When Harriet Martineau was more than fifty, she wrote a detailed account of all she had suffered in childhood, not from any want of gratitude or affection to her parents, but because she felt that mothers ought to know what their children sometimes suffer, so that they might protect them by tender watchfulness from becoming victims of these imaginary terrors. It is not, it must be remembered, stupid children who are most subject to these “ghostly enemies,” but much more frequently it is the children of vivid imagination and bright intelligence who are most subject to them. A child who is frightened of the dark ought not to be unkindly ridiculed or forced to endure what terrifies it; it ought to be helped by all gentle means to overcome its fear, and all other unreasonable fears conjured up by its imagination. That Harriet Martineau showed in early childhood that she was gifted with extraordinary mental powers cannot be doubted. At seven years old she “discovered” _Paradise Lost_. She had been left at home one Sunday evening, when all the rest of the family had gone to chapel, and she began looking at the books on the table. One of them was turned down open. She took it up, and began looking at it. It was _Paradise Lost_. The first thing she saw was the word “Argument” at the head of a chapter, which she thought must mean a dispute, and could make nothing of; but something about Satan cleaving Chaos made her turn to the poetry, and, in her own words, that evening’s reading fixed her mental destiny for the next seven years; the volume was henceforth never to be found, but by asking her for it. “In a few months, I believe there was hardly a line in _Paradise Lost_ that I could not have instantly turned to. I sent myself to sleep by repeating it, and when my curtains were drawn back in the morning, descriptions of heavenly light rushed into my memory.” Her keen appreciation of Milton’s great poem was the compensation nature provided for the imaginative terrors which made her childhood such a sad one.