well-pleased childhood? Well, these Japanese children, if they are
in the least inclined to be timid or nervous, must have an awful
time of it at night in the dark, and when they make that eerie
"northwest passage" bedwards through the darkling house of which Mr.
Stevenson sings the perils and the emotions. All of us who did not
suffer under parents brought up on the views of Mr. Herbert Spencer
have endured, in childhood, a good deal from ghosts. But it is
nothing to what Japanese children bear, for our ghosts are to the
spectres of Japan as moonlight is to sunlight, or as water unto
whisky. Personally I may say that few people have been plagued by
the terror that walketh in darkness more than myself. At the early
age of ten I had the tales of the ingenious Mr. Edgar Poe and of
Charlotte Bronte "put into my hands" by a cousin who had served as a
Bashi Bazouk, and knew not the meaning of fear. But I DID, and
perhaps even Nelson would have found out "what fear was," or the boy
in the Norse tale would have "learned to shiver," if he had been
left alone to peruse 'Jane Eyre,' and the 'Black Cat,' and the 'Fall
of the House of Usher,' as I was. Every night I expected to wake up
in my coffin, having been prematurely buried; or to hear sighs in
the area, followed by light, unsteady footsteps on the stairs, and
then to see a lady all in a white shroud stained with blood and clay
stagger into my room, the victim of too rapid interment. As to the
notion that my respected kinsman had a mad wife concealed on the
premises, and that a lunatic aunt, black in the face with suppressed
mania, would burst into my chamber, it was comparatively a harmless
fancy, and not particularly disturbing. Between these and the
'Yellow Dwarf,' who (though only the invention of the Countess
D'Aulnoy) might frighten a nervous infant into hysterics, I
personally had as bad a time of it in the night watches as any happy
British child has survived. But our ogres are nothing to the bogies