Some people live in deadly fear of burglars
and highway robbers, taking each night's safety
as an escape scarcely to be looked for, save by
miraculous interposition. In the country these
are awful companions, male or female. A hooting
owl crying out its owlish soul in the ivy of the
barn yonder, is the burglar—always the burglar
—whistling to his companion; the odd sighs and
starts of windows and doors and crazy furniture,
are the noises of masked men entering by the
kitchen window, or the hall door, or wherever
the defence work seems the least secure; a tree
stump in the twilight is a man lurking by the
hedge-side, with a bludgeon as thick as your
arm; and I remember one of these poor
demented bodies running a good mile and a
half without once stopping to take breath,
because a stray cow was ruminating in the dark
lane. Another fear that haunts the hedgerows
and meadows, is the fear of cows and dogs, and
quadrupeds generally. To certain persons, for the
most part women who have been foolishly
educated, a herd of cows, let them be as tame and
harmless as so many old sheep, are ramping
roaring bulls, which it is more than your life
is worth to go near; every yelping colley telling
his master that strangers are coming, is a Dog of
Montargis, and will spring at your throat before
another minute has gone; a turkey with his
wattles scarlet and his tail up, gobbling his
importance to the world at large and teaching his
young turkey chicks how to make such a figure
in life as shall command attention, is as formidable
as a lammer-geier to a dying man; and
even a panting sheep that looks at you steadily,
stamping its foot in sheepish anger, and does
not at once turn tail and flee away, has sinister
designs which it would be quite as well to
prevent by getting out of its way the speediest
possible. Poor daft bodies! they die a thousand
deaths when they are not in danger of so
much as a pin's scratch, and turn all their good
to evil, and their beauty to horror, because of
that unconquerable folly of fear—that insane
possession of terror; as insane as was ever the
possession of succubus and incubus in the good
old times that are (happily) gone for ever.

Travel, again, is occasion for awful fear with
many. Some are sure they will be smashed
every time they take a railway journey, and sit
holding on to dear life in an agony until they come
to the end. Every whistle presages a danger;
shutting off the steam means a horrid collision
close at hand; a beat the faster of the throbbing
heart of iron, and they are whirling off the rails
and down the nearest precipice; slackened
speed betokens luggage waggons in front, an
express with a driver who is colour blind in the
rear, or a third-class station with the switches
turned the wrong way. They are always jumping
up and putting their heads out of the
windows to see what is the matter, and they
plague the guards and porters with foolish
questions and terrified suggestions. Some are in the
same agony for others out on the rails; and fret
and fume till they have news of the safe arrival
of the traveller, sure that something disastrous
will have happened. But this fear of railway
travelling is not so insane, by-the-by, as some
others; judging by late events.

Others are in the same cold terror as soon as
they ascend the steps of a carriage. They
suffer (in apprehension) under all sorts of
accidents. They go into the ditch, and are upset
over the stone heaps, as often as they pass one
or the other; down every steep pitch the tackle
breaks, or the horse falls, or runs away, or
otherwise upsets them; up every hill he jibs
and runs them backward into eternity. If he
prick up his ears, he is wild; if he lay them
back, they have heard that was a very bad sign,
and does it mean kicking? If he paw a little,
or fidget while standing, he is going to rear
and break the whole concern to bits; if he
look askance at anything in the road, he shies;
if he put himself on his mettle, he is running
away; if he toss up his head he has the bit
between his teeth, and life is not worth the
turn of a penny; if he contemplate the ground,
as some horses will do, philosophically, he is a
stumbler and will bring all to grief.

The same kind of fear may be seen any day,
triumphant in a passenger-boat. If the wind
blow half a capful, it is a gale, and we are bound
for the bottom without further ado; if the
vessels pitch more than a boat on a summer lake,
she will capsize to a dead certainty; every crash
of the old timbers, or rattle of uneasy crockery,
is the hollow voice of death, when he is countless
leagues away, grimly watching the foundering
of a gallant man-of-war in an Atlantic storm.

A vast amount of false fear surrounds children
in the minds of certain of the more timid and
loving mothers. Pale, they are ill; flushed,
they are feverish; a cold, with heavy eyelids
and eyes a little crimsoned and suffused, is
the beginning of measles; a small sore-throat
means diphtheria or scarlet fever; heat spots
are small-pox; growing pains are concealed
abscesses and diseased joints; if slightly ill,
they are dangerously so; if dangerously so,
irrecoverably and mortally. If the children be a
little later than the mother expects in their
return from a pleasant expedition, they have
met with some frightful misadventure, and
there is grave talk of scouring the country
and sending off every available male in the
neighbourhood to see what is amiss. She
makes the boys effeminate, not because she
wishes them to be milksops but because she is
afraid to let them be manly. They may not
ride, until they are too old to learn well, for
fear they will be thrown and get their necks
broken; they may not go out with gun and
dogs like other boys, lest the gun should burst,
or lest they should shoot themselves or somebody
else, or, worse than that, be shot by somebody
else; boating and swimming mean drowning
so does skating on anything deeper than a
duck-pond; a school is a place of torment where
their beds will not be aired, where no one will
look after them when they have colds or
chilblains, where the big boys will beat them, and
where they will learn all sorts of vague vice
and immorality in the intervals between their
poundings and thrashings. No crown of glory