open grave,
that was dug near the grave of that man who believed there was a hole
through the earth from pole to pole, and had a perforated stone globe on
top of his monument.

XVII.

FANTASIES AND SUPERSTITIONS.

MY boy used to be afraid of this monument, which stood a long time, or
what seemed to him a long time, in the yard of the tombstone cutter
before it was put up at the grave of the philosopher who imagined the
earth as hollow as much of the life is on it. He was a brave officer in
the army which held the region against the Indians in the pioneer times;
he passed the latter part of his life there, and he died and was buried
in the Boy's Town. My boy had to go by the yard when he went to see his
grandmother, and even at high noon the sight of the officer's monument,
and the other gravestones standing and leaning about, made his flesh
creep and his blood run cold. When there were other boys with him he
would stop at the door of the shed, where a large, fair German was
sawing slabs of marble with a long saw that had no teeth, and that he
eased every now and then with water from a sponge he kept by him; but if
the boy was alone, and it was getting at all late in the afternoon, he
always ran by the place as fast as he could. He could hardly have told
what he was afraid of, but he must have connected the gravestones with
ghosts.

[Illustration: "HE ALWAYS RAN BY THE PLACE AS FAST AS HE COULD."]

His superstitions were not all of the ghastly kind; some of them related
to conduct and character. It was noted long ago how boys throw stones,
for instance, at a tree, and feign to themselves that this thing or
that, of great import, will happen or not as they hit or miss the tree.
But my boy had other fancies, which came of things he had read and half
understood. In one of his school-books was a story that began, "Charles
was an honest boy, but Robert was the name of a thief," and it went on
to show how Charles grew up in the respect and affection of all who knew
him by forbearing to steal some oranges which their owner had set for
safe-keeping at the heels of his horse, while Robert was kicked at once
(there was a picture that showed him holding his stomach with both
hands), and afterwards came to a bad end, through attempting to take
one. My boy conceived from the tale that the name of Robert was
necessarily associated with crime; it was long before he outgrew the
prejudice; and this tale and others of a like