except when he was at school: but long after, when I was looking in
a lumber-room with my brother for some mislaid toys, I found in a
box the mask of Abracadabra and the horn. I put it hurriedly on,
and blew a blast on the horn, which seemed to be of tortoise-shell
with metal fittings. To my amazement, he turned perfectly white,
covered his face with his hands, and burst out with the most
dreadful moans. I thought at first that he was making believe to be
frightened, but I saw in a minute or two that he had quite lost
control of himself, and the things were hurriedly put away. At the
time I thought it a silly kind of affectation. But I perceive now
that he had had a real shock the first time he had seen the mask;
and though he was then a big schoolboy, the terror was indelible.
Who can say of what old inheritance of fear that horror of the
great ape-like countenance was the sign? He had no associations of
fear with apes, but it must have been, I think, some dim old
primeval terror, dating from some ancestral encounter with a forest
monster. In no other way can I explain it.

Again, as a child, I was once sitting at dinner with my parents,
reading an old bound-up Saturday Magazine, looking at the pictures,
and waiting for dessert. I turned a page, and saw a picture of a
Saint, lying on the ground, holding up a cross, and a huge and
cloudy fiend with vast bat-like wings bending over him, preparing
to clutch him, but deterred by the sacred emblem. That was a really
terrible shock. I turned the page hastily, and said nothing, though
it deprived me of speech and appetite. My father noticed my
distress, and asked if I felt unwell, but I said "No." I got
through dessert somehow; but then I had to say good-night, go out
into the dimly-lit hall, slip the volume back into the bookcase,
and get upstairs. I tore up the staircase, feeling the air full of