Probably, too, imaginative children, whose minds take in something of the bigness of the sea, will be more disposed to this variety of fear. A mother writes me that her elder child, an imaginative girl, has not even now at the age of six got over her fear of going into the sea, whereas her sister, one and a quarter years younger, and not of an imaginative temperament, is perfectly fearless. She adds that it is the bigness of the sea which evidently impresses the imagination of the elder. Imaginative children, too, are apt to give life and purpose to the big moving noisy thing. This is illustrated in M. Pierre Loti’s graphic account of his first childish impressions of the sea, seen one evening in the twilight. “It was of a dark, almost black green: it seemed restless, treacherous, ready to swallow: it was stirring and swaying everywhere at the same time, with the look of sinister wickedness.”[140] ----- Footnote 140: _Le Roman d’un Enfant._ ----- There seems enough in the vast waste of unresting waters to excite the imagination of a child to awe and terror. Hence it is needless to follow M. Loti in his speculations as to an inherited fear of the sea. He seems to base this supposition on the fact that at this first view he distinctly _recognised_ the sea. But such recognition may have meant merely the objective realisation of what had no doubt been before pretty fully described by his mother and aunt, and imaginatively pictured by himself. The opposite attitude, that of the thoroughly unimaginative child, in presence of the sea is well illustrated by the story of a little girl aged two, who, on being first taken to see the watery wonder, exclaimed, “Oh, mamma, look at the soapy water”. The awful mystery of all the stretch of ever-moving water was invisible to this child, being hidden behind the familiar detail of the ‘soapy’ edge. There is probably nothing in the natural world which makes on the childish imagination quite so awful an impression as the watery Leviathan. Perhaps the fear which one of my correspondents tells me was excited in her when a child by the sudden appearance of a mountain may be akin to this dread of the sea. We may now pass to another group of fear-excitants, the appearance of certain strange forms and movements of objects.