ges, and such miserable
spiritual cowards--that is, if they have any imagination--that they
will believe anything which is taught them, and a great deal more
which they teach themselves.

I was born and bred, as I have told you twenty times, among books
and those who knew what was in books. I was carefully instructed
in things temporal and spiritual. But up to a considerable
maturity of childhood I believed Raphael and Michael Angelo to have
been superhuman beings. The central doctrine of the prevalent
religious faith of Christendom was utterly confused and neutralized
in my mind for years by one of those too common stories of actual
life, which I overheard repeated in a whisper.--Why did I not ask?
you will say.--You don't remember the rosy pudency of sensitive
children. The first instinctive movement of the little creatures
is to make a cache, and bury in it beliefs, doubts, dreams, hopes,
and terrors. I am uncovering one of these CACHES. Do you think I
was necessarily a greater fool and coward than another?

I was afraid of ships. Why, I could never tell. The masts looked
frightfully tall,--but they were not so tall as the steeple of our
old yellow meeting-house. At any rate I used to hide my eyes from
the sloops and schooners that were wont to lie at the end of the
bridge, and I confess that traces of this undefined terror lasted
very long.--One other source of alarm had a still more fearful
significance. There was a great wooden HAND,--a glove-maker's
sign, which used to swing and creak in the blast, as it hung from a
pillar before a certain shop a mile or two outside of the city.
Oh, the dreadful hand! Always hanging there ready to catch up a
little boy, who would come home to supper no more, nor yet to bed,
--whose porringer would be laid away empty thenceforth, and his
half-worn shoes wait until his small brother grew to fit them.

As for all manner of superstitious observances, I used once to
think I must have been peculiar in having such a list of them, but
I now believe that half the children of the same age go through the
same experiences. No Roman soothsayer ever had such a catalogue of
OMENS as I found in the Sibylline leaves of my childhood. That
trick of throwing a stone at a tree and attaching some mighty issue
to hitting or missing, which you will find mentioned in one or more
biographies, I well remember. Stepping on or over certain
particular things or spots--Dr. Johnson's especial