Whenever I think of that last and the horror we held it in, it comes to me that our dread of crawling things must be largely a matter of legs, due to our prejudice in favor of the standard two or four. The hell-horse was ever so much more horrible because of its limping about by night on three. We hate a spider, which has six or eight, and loathe the thousand-leg worm with cause. And at the other end, when it comes to the snake, that has no legs at all, we are prompted by an instant impulse to kill it. It is not a religious prejudice at all, no Garden of Eden notion, but an instinctive recoil from the thing that does not conform to the established standard in legs. But whether that be so or not, the hell-horse that so terrorized us, was a decadent beast. He was literally on his last legs in my childhood, and even the Old Town knows him no more, I guess. The man with his head under his arm was, if anything, worse than the hell-horse, and had an unpleasant habit of making himself at home under your roof. The three-legged beast at least stayed outside. There was a headless man in the old mansion at Sönderskov, where I sometimes spent my summer vacation. You could hear him walk in the midnight hour up and down, up and down the hall, and we boys lay and shivered in bed for fear he would come to our door and knock. I have heard him more than once since I grew up and identified his tread on the oaken stairs with the regular beat of the tower-clock above my head, but still I confess to a creepy feeling when I hear it.