y
would turn into hair-snakes; and when you drank out of a spring you had
to be careful not to swallow a hair-snake, or it would remain in your
stomach and grow there.

When you saw a lizard, you had to keep your mouth tight shut, or else
the lizard would run down your throat before you knew it. That was what
all the boys said, and my boy believed it, though he had never heard of
anybody that it happened to. He believed that if you gave a chicken-cock
burnt brandy it could lay eggs, and that if you gave a boy burnt brandy
it would stop his growing. That was the way the circus-men got their
dwarfs, and the India-rubber man kept himself limber by rubbing his
joints with rattlesnake oil.

A snake could charm a person, and when you saw a snake you had to kill
it before it could get its eye on you or it would charm you. Snakes
always charmed birds; and there were mysterious powers of the air and
forces of nature that a boy had to be on his guard against, just as a
bird had to look out for snakes. You must not kill a granddaddy-long-legs,
or a lady-bug; it was bad luck. My boy believed, or was afraid he
believed, that

"What you dream Monday morning before daylight
Will come true before Saturday night,"

but if it was something bad, you could keep it from coming true by not
telling your dream till you had eaten breakfast. He governed his little,
foolish, frightened life not only by the maxims he had learned out of
his "Gesta Romanorum," but by common sayings of all sorts, such as

"See a pin and leave it lay
You'll have bad luck all the day,"

and if ever he tried to rebel against this slavery, and went by a pin in
the path, his fears tormented him till he came back and picked it up. He
would not put on his left stocking first, for that was bad luck; but
besides these superstitions, which were common to all the boys, he
invented superstitions of his own, with which he made his life a burden.
He did not know why, but he would not step upon the cracks between the
paving-stones, and some days he had to touch every tree or post along
the sidewalk, as Doctor Johnson did in his time, though the boy had
never heard of Doctor Johnson then.

While he was yet a very little fellow, he had the distorted, mistaken
piety of childhood. He had an abject terror of dying, but it seemed to
him that if a person could die right in the centre isle of the
church--the Methodist church where his moth