still and sleep like a gude bairn. But just as I was dropping off to
sleep I swallowed the bulky wad of medicated cotton and with it, as I
imagined, my tongue also. My screams over so great a loss brought
mother, darkest corners of the house, and oftentimes a long search
was required to find me. But after we were a few years older, we
enjoyed bathing with other boys as we wandered along the shore,
careful, however, not to get into a pool that had an invisible
boy-devouring monster at the bottom of it. Such pools, miniature
maelstroms, were called "sookin-in-goats" and were well known to most
of us. Nevertheless we never ventured into any pool on strange parts
of the coast before we had thrust a stick into it. If the stick were
not pulled out of our hands, we boldly entered and enjoyed plashing
and ducking long ere we had learned to swim.

One of our best playgrounds was the famous old Dunbar Castle, to which
King Edward fled after his defeat at Bannockburn. It was built more
than a thousand years ago, and though we knew little of its history,
we had heard many mysterious stories of the battles fought about its
walls, and firmly believed that every bone we found in the ruins
belonged to an ancient warrior. We tried to see who could climb
highest on the crumbling peaks and crags, and took chances that no
cautious mountaineer would try. That I did not fall and finish my
rock-scrambling in those adventurous boyhood days seems now a
reasonable wonder.

Among our best games were running, jumping, wrestling, and scrambling.
I was so proud of my skill as a climber that when I first heard of
hell from a servant girl who loved to tell its horrors and warn us
that if we did anything wrong we would be cast into it, I always
insisted that I could climb out of it. I imagined it was only a sooty