Anxiety, fear, horror will twine themselves perpetually around the memory, like deadly ivy choking the light of reason. At every step we remember the terrors of childhood: the vaults of a cellar, the dark arch of a bridge, the cross-roads losing themselves in the darkness, the crosses hidden amidst the bushes of a cemetery, a dim light flickering far away in the darkness of night, a lonely cave washed by the waves of the sea, the ruins of an uninhabited castle, the mysterious silence of a deserted tower, breathe out the memory of childish fear. The eye of the child seems to cast one more look on these scenes from out of the very depths of the soul. Not only the mother, the nurse, the maid, or the servants, but hundreds of generations have worked to denaturalise the brains of children with the same barbarity as those wild tribes who distort the heads of their children by pressure, deforming what they think to beautify. The children of ancient Greece and Rome used to be frightened with the lamias who would suck their blood, with the masks of the atellans, the Cyclops, or with a black Mercury who would come to carry them away. And this most pernicious error in education has not yet disappeared, for children are still frightened with the bogey-man, with stories of imaginary monsters, the ogre, the hobgoblin, the wizard, and the witches. Every now and then children are told: 'This will peck at you,’ 'That will bite you,’ 'Now I’ll call the dog,’ 'There’s the sweep coming,’ and a hundred other terrors which make the tears well up and spoil their disposition, making their life a burden by incessantly agitating them with threats, with tortures, which will make them timid and shrinking for the rest of their life. The imagination of children is far more vivid and excitable than in adults. When a child is naturally timorous, it is better not to leave it in the dark, but to keep a night-light burning in the room, so that, on waking, it may at once recognise the place, and its fancies may not assume an air of reality. The child’s eye is much more apt than ours to trace pursuing spectres in the outlines of accustomed objects. The stories told them in the evening, any exciting emotions towards night-time, are most certainly reproduced in their dreams. A turkey-cock, ten days old, that had never heard the cry of the falcon, disappeared with the rapidity of lightning when it heard the cry the first time, hiding itself in a corner, where it cowered motionless and silent for more than ten minutes.