I remember a joke played on a geographical professor at the gymnasium who, as he carelessly opened a closet door, was confronted by a skeleton which had been used in the previous lecture. Students could hardly subsist without the ancient trick of stuffing the clothes of a “suicide,” and placing the figure on the floor of their victim’s room with a pistol lying near, or hanging it by a rope to the window frame, to give the late home-comer a genuine scare. In Athenäus we find a beautiful instance of readiness to meet such a trick. King Lysimachus, who took delight in teasing his guests, one day at a banquet threw a skilfully made artificial scorpion on to the dress of one Bithys, who recoiled; but, quickly recovering himself, said to the rather penurious king: “My lord, it is now my turn to frighten you; I beseech you give me a talent.”[458] Such sport with fear, though harmless in these instances, becomes a passion with all narrowminded, tyrannous natures, and leads to cruelty which is anything but playful. Slatin’s dramatic work, Fire and Sword in the Soudan, gives an instance of such traits in the character of the Caliph Abdullah. Indeed, Abdullah had a part in, or rather was the occasion of, Slatin’s first experience during the life of the Mahdi. Slatin was taken prisoner by the Mahdi’s army before the gates of Khartoum. The morning after the city was taken, alarming rumours reached him; half incredulous, he looked out of his tent. “A mob had collected before the quarters of the Mahdi and his caliphs; it seemed to be getting into motion and making toward me, and I soon saw clearly that they were coming in the direction of my tent. I could now distinguish single persons. First walked the negro soldiers, one of whom, whose name was Shetta, carried a bloody burden on his head. Behind him howled the mob. The slaves entered my tent and stood glowering before me, and Shetta opened the roll of cloth and showed me—Gordon’s head! I grew faint and dizzy at the sight, my breath stopped, and it was only by the greatest effort that I commanded myself sufficiently to gaze upon that pallid face.” The Mahdi and his caliphs had ordered this hideous cruelty.[459] A common and early developed form of teasing is the deception which imparts to the perpetrator a feeling of intellectual superiority. Children display this in their tender years principally by pretending that they are going to do forbidden or improper things, as revolt against authority. When the little girl observed by Pollock was twenty-three months old she often declined to kiss her father good-night. She turned from him as if annoyed or indifferent, to make a _fausse sortie_, and then called him back and gave the kiss.[460] Sigismund’s boy often exhibited a “kind of humorous defiance of authority,” such as grasping at a light standing near him, but not so that it could burn him, and looking slyly at his father.[461]