But with what gusto he tells us of the old peasant midwife who assisted at his “first experience with fear” and prophesied, after the manner of her kind, that he would become “a great man!” His father, not to be outdone, was of the opinion that he was “poetically gifted” from the start. The idea of anticipated power may also lie behind the fact that the favorite toy of his babyhood was a yellow porcelain lion. And were I to follow his own method of the free association of ideas yet further, I might suggest that it was this lion which afterwards led him to visit England. In any case, visit England he did, when he was nineteen, and spent a day on the shore of the Irish sea, amusing himself by catching the “sea animals” left behind by the waves. A pretty little girl, seeing him engaged with a starfish, approaches and asks, “Isn’t it alive?” He answers in halting English but correctly enough, “Yes, he is alive.” And now the adult Freud must needs spoil this idyl by explaining that he was much embarrassed by his grammatical “mistake,” and hastened to substitute an _it_ for the _he_, fearing that the slip of the tongue in dealing with gender had already betrayed the improper meaning which in his thoughts he had attached to the masculine pronoun. Really, at times Freud is quite intolerable--and he seems to fancy, even yet, that he improved matters by his “correction” of himself. Since visiting England, he has always wanted to visit Rome, but has never done so, pretending to himself that Rome is not healthy in summer, the only time he is free to travel. He knows quite well that this excuse is about a hundred years out of date, but appears to be prevented by a complex from entering the Eternal City. For Freud, all roads lead to sex, and no road leads to Rome--which becomes quite understandable when we learn that for him Rome meant Catholicism. And when he tells us further that he often dreams that he is Hannibal, whom he identifies as Judaism, he makes it plain that with him it is _aut Cæsar aut nullus_. He would like to enter Rome as Hannibal the Semitic commander, would have liked to enter it--in the rôle of conqueror. At present the Pope and Mussolini stand like inhibitions at the gate. At one time in Vienna he lived in a house having one set of rooms upon the ground floor, serving him for an office, and a second set upon the story above, where he had his domestic quarters. The two levels were connected only by an outside stairway, and it was his custom always to “jump over the steps,” two at a time, arriving at the top suddenly and out of breath. And from this he derives his unrepeatable description of the symbolism of staircases as seen in dreams, where he gives them a sexual, even a rhythmic, significance.