It was black when Keith woke suddenly. Some little sound had pierced the depths of his profound immersion in sleep. He imagined Indians or Cowboys or Skinners. His ears seemed to rise like a terrier’s; his skin bristled with attention. He wondered if thieves were about; or lions or tigers or any of the witches or hobgoblins that peopled the night. It was the good old custom to invoke all manner of demons for the discipline of children. Good children never asked questions or never delayed to sleep. Bad children were watched not only by an unsleeping God of remarkable vindictiveness but by swarms of demons, child-eating animals, ogres that made ginger-bread of babies, or so-called saints who broiled them on live coals in a kitchen called hell. It was a hard world for children here and hereafter. The nightmares that attended waking hours were horrifying, but at night alone upstairs, with the dark smothering and blinding the wide eyes that could see little and imagine much, and the room a very lair of shapeless monsters that could see without being seen, it was the supreme torment. Even to cry aloud to nurse for help or a bit of light was to incur an added punishment. To run wildly out of the cavern and seek shelter in parental arms was to incur ridicule and often to shock strange guests and bring shame upon father and mother. Even grown-up people lost their senses when they were awake in the dark and made spooks and ghosts of dark chairs and tables, heard groans and clanking chains in the night-wind noises and the creaking of restless timbers. RoBards as a child had run the gauntlet of such agonies. He tried to save his children from them, but in vain. The lonely babies concocted fiends of their own, and nurses, impatient to be free of their importunities, added traditional atrocities. RoBards had caught one or two of the nurses at the ancient game and discharged them, only to be looked upon as a meddler. He had threatened the dusky Teen with a return to slavery if she did not try to disabuse the children’s minds of savagery. But she believed too much herself to be relied upon to inculcate atheism. Keith was a brave little knight, however, and an investigator by instinct. Instinctively he pitted his inborn skepticism against the tyrannies of imagination, and when he could not exorcise a fiend by denying it, he met it with bravery. His bedroom was a little Thermopylæ and he Leonidas fighting the swarming hosts. Sometimes he surrendered and buried his head under the pillow. Sometimes he put them all to ignominious flight. He had an ally of mystic powers who now and then gave unconscious aid: an old crack-voiced rooster, a tenor who had seen better days, who dreamed aloud at midnight of his former glories and snored a sleepy cock-a-doodle-doo long before the young beaux started their morning fanfare.