ertake to train them, are certainly among the most mysterious of
Heaven-permitted evils. The coarse and cruel handling of these
wonderfully complex and delicate machines by ignorant servants, ignorant
teachers, and ignorant parents, fills one with pity and with amazement
that the results of such processes should not be even more disastrous
than they are.

In the nature of many children exists a capacity of terror equalled in
its intensity only by the reticence which conceals it. The fear of
ridicule is strong in these sensitive small souls, but even that is
inadequate to account for the silent agony with which they hug the
secret of their fear. Nursery and schoolroom authorities, fonder of
power than of principle, find their account in both these tendencies,
and it is marvellous to what a point tyranny may be exercised by means
of their double influence over children, the sufferers never having
recourse to the higher parental authority by which they would be
delivered from the nightmare of silent terror imposed upon them.

The objects that excite the fears of children are often as curious and
unaccountable as their secret intensity. A child four years of age, who
was accustomed to be put to bed in a dressing-room opening into her
mother's room, and near her nursery, and was left to go to sleep alone,
from a desire that she should not be watched and lighted to sleep (or in
fact kept awake, after a very common nursery practice), endured this
discipline without remonstrance, and only years afterwards informed her
mother that she never was so left in her little bed, alone in the
darkness, without a full conviction that a large black dog was lying
under it, which terrible imagination she never so much as hinted at, or
besought for light or companionship to dispel. Miss Martineau told me
once, that a special object of horror to her, when she was a child, were
the colors of the prism, a thing in itself so beautiful, that it is
difficult to conceive how any imagination could be painfully impressed
by it; but her terror of these magical colors was such, that she used to
rush past the room, even when the door was closed, where she had seen
them reflected from the chandelier, by the sunlight, on the wall.

The most singular instance I ever knew, however, of unaccountable terror
produced in a child's mind by the pure action of its imagination, was
that of a little boy who overheard a conversation between his mother and
a friend u