weedy patch--Discovery of a large black snake--Watching for its
reappearance--Seen going to its den--The desire to see it again--A
vain search--Watching a bat--The black serpent reappears at my feet--
Emotions and conjectures--Melanism--My baby sister and a strange
snake--The mystery solved


CHAPTER XVII
A BOY'S ANIMISM

The animistic faculty and its survival in us--A boy's animism and its
persistence--Impossibility of seeing our past exactly as it was--Serge
Aksakoff's history of his childhood--The child's delight in nature
purely physical--First intimations of animism in the child--How it
affected me--Feeling with regard to flowers--A flower and my mother
--History of a flower--Animism with regard to trees--Locust trees by
moonlight--Animism and nature-worship--Animistic emotion not uncommon
--Cowper and the Yardley oak--The religionist's fear of nature--
Pantheistic Christianity--Survival of nature-worship in England--
The feeling for nature--Wordsworth's pantheism and animistic emotion
in poetry


CHAPTER XVIII
THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER

Mr. Trigg recalled--His successor--Father O'Keefe--His mild rule and
love of angling--My brother is assisted in his studies by the priest--
Happy fishing afternoons--The priest leaves us--How he had been
working out his own salvation--We run wild once more--My brother's