insight she touched upon his weakest point.

"Would you be afraid of coffins and spooks or to go to a graveyard in the
dead of the night the way Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn did?"

Not having read Tom Sawyer, Richard evaded the question by asking, "How
did they do?"

"Oh, don't you know? They had the dead cat and they saw old Injun Joe
come with the lantern and kill the man that was with Muff Potter."

By the time Georgina had given the bare outline of the story in her
dramatic way, Richard was quite sure that no power under heaven could
entice him into a graveyard at midnight, though nothing could have
induced him to admit this to Georgina. As far back as he could remember
he had had an unreasoning dread of coffins. Even now, big as he was, big
enough to wear "'leven-year-old suits," nothing could tempt him into a
furniture shop for fear of seeing a coffin.

One of his earliest recollections was of his nurse taking him into a
little shop, at some village where they were spending the summer, and his
cold terror when he found himself directly beside a long brown one,
smelling of varnish, and with silver handles. His nurse's tales had much
to do with creating this repulsion, also her threat of shutting him up in
a coffin if he wasn't a good boy. When she found that she could exact
obedience by keeping that dread hanging over him, she used the threat
daily.

"I'll tell you what I'll do," he said finally. "I'll let you go digging
with me if you're game enough to go to the graveyard and walk clear