culty may be cultivated, and this
is a field in which, with least effort, and with least expenditure of
seed, you may reap the fullest crop.

Whilst I was yet a very little fellow, a certain big-boned,
well-fleshed, waddling wench from the local workhouse became a unit in
my mother's household. Her chief occupation seemed to be to instruct
my brothers and sisters and myself in various and many methods of being
terrified. Three score years ago there was, in that part of the country,
a fascinating belief in witchcraft. There was in our near neighbourhood,
for example, a person known as the Dudley Devil, who could bewitch
cattle, and cause milch kine to yield blood. He had philtres of all
sorts--noxious and innocuous--and it was currently believed that he went
lame because, in the character of an old dog-fox, he had been shot by
an irate farmer whose hen-roost he had robbed beyond the bounds of
patience. He used to discover places where objects were hidden which
had been stolen from local farmhouses, and he was reckoned to do this by
certain forms of magical incantation. In my maturer mind, I am disposed
to believe that he was a professional receiver of stolen goods, and I
am pretty sure that the modern police would have made short work of him.
But from the time that foolish, fat scullion came into the household
service, we were all impressed with a dreadful sense of this gentleman's
potentialities for evil; and darkened rooms and passages about the
house, into which we had hitherto ventured without any hint of fear,
were suddenly and horribly alive with this man's presence.

Speaking for myself, as I have sole right to do, I know that he haunted
every place of darkness. He positively peopled the back kitchen to which
we went for coals. He haunted a little larder on the left, and stood on
each of the three steps which led down to its red brick floor, whilst at
the same instant he was horribly ready to pounce upon one from the rear;
was waiting in the doorway just in front; was crouching in each corner
of the darkened chamber, and hidden in the chimney. That fat, foolish
scullion slept in the same room with my brother and myself. He, as I
find by reference to contemporary annals, was seven at this time, and
I was five, and we got to know afterwards that the sprawling wench grew
hungry in the night-time, and went downstairs to filch heels of loaves
and cheese, or anything our rather spare household economy left open to
her