Fears belong to the abdomen. You can feel them there. They are quicker than thought. Perhaps you had a twinge of nerves over some sight or sound or odour, before your mind could tell you what you were afraid of.... I have often told the young ones here--listening a bit to my own voice--that there isn't anything living or dead, phantom, shell, or living soul, that has got the authority to make the spirit of man quail. Courage is spirit. Most people don't care to try to deal with it; they let it have its way.... Do you recall the fears of the dark room as a child--fear always stealing behind--upstairs alone, the rush to the light, almost screaming tension?... I heard a patter of steps the other evening and knew the whole story--a boy of seven. He had been sent upstairs without a light. I sent him back, told him to stay there until he got himself in hand--to stay in the dark and think the bogie down. He was well afterward. I have known some under-fire work. A man soon gets himself in hand to look straight at a white-fringed trench. Fear of sharks furnished another test. From a child the deep-sea devourers had an exquisite fascination for me--to be cut in two under brine, white belly, backward mouth, black-rimmed, hairy pig eyes, the double-rows of teeth.... Pacific Islanders swim in the same harbour with fourteen-foot scavengers, careless of whole schools of monsters, yet scurry to their boats at the sight of one solitary, _different_ fin. I had seen the so-called, man-eating brutes, "grey nurses," dim grey horrors with dull black spots. A well-fed imagination also came into play. I went swimming in the surf with a splendid Australian chap--a doctor home from the trenches.... He left me back in the surf lines and started out to sea. I finished my swim decently in toward North America, and lay on the strand. From time to time off in the sunset I saw my friend's head.... I was glad to grab the beach-comber when he came in. "It's all perfectly sane and splendid," I said, "and I'm glad to have you back for supper with us, and the billows out yonder are doubtless all that you say, for an afternoon's lie-up, only I venture to ask--what if a grey nurse should happen in from the lower islands?" "You don't think about them," he said. That's about all there is to the fear subject. You don't let it get you. There is nothing worth fearing in or above or under the plane of manifestation.... So I tried that out in deep water. The old horrors succumbed like the fear of the precipice, but not so readily, quite. One can imagine keenly in the dim deep; the touch of sea-weed quickens all the monsters of the mind....