vaults, that if you stamp but a little
louder than ordinary, you hear the sound repeated. At the same time the
walk of elms, with the croaking of the ravens which from time to time are
heard from the tops of them, looks exceeding solemn and venerable. These
objects naturally raise seriousness and attention; and when night
heightens the awfulness of the place, and pours out her supernumerary[75]
horrors upon everything in it, I do not at all wonder that weak minds
fill it with spectres and apparitions.

Mr. Locke, in his chapter of the Association of Ideas, has very
curious[76] remarks to show how, by the prejudice of education[77], one
idea often introduces into the mind a whole set that bear no resemblance
to one another in the nature of things. Among several examples of this
kind, he produces the following instance. "The ideas of goblins and
sprites have really no more to do with darkness than light: yet let but a
foolish maid inculcate these often on the mind of a child, and raise them
there together, possibly he shall never be able to separate them again so
long as he lives; but darkness shall ever afterwards bring with it those
frightful ideas, and they shall be so joined, that he can no more bear
the one than the other."

As I was walking in this solitude, where the dusk of the evening
conspired with so many other occasions of terror, I observed a cow
grazing not far from me, which an imagination that was apt to startle
might easily have construed into a black horse without an head: and I
dare say the poor footman lost his wits upon some such trivial occasion.

My friend Sir Roger has often told me with a good deal of mirth, that at
his first coming to his estate he found three parts of his house
altogether useless; that the best room in it had the reputation of being
haunted, and by that means[78] was locked up; that noises had been heard
in his long gallery, so that he could not get a servant to enter it after
eight o'clock at night; that the door of one of the chambers was nailed
up, because there went a story in the family that a butler had formerly
hanged himself in it; and that his mother, who lived to a great age, had
shut up half the rooms in the house, in which either her husband, a son,
or daughter had died. The Knight seeing his habitation reduced to so
small a compass, and himself in a manner shut out of his own house, upon
the death of his mother ordered all the apartments to be flung open, and
exo