Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/356

344 dark places. Mr. Stevens, in his note on his boy's ideas of the supernatural, remarks that when one year and ten months old he was temporarily seized with a fear of the dark at the time when he began to be haunted by the specter of "Cocky." It is important to add that even children who have been habituated to going to bed in the dark in the first months are liable to acquire the fear.

This mode of fear is, however, not universal among children. One lady, for whose accuracy I can vouch, assures me that her boy, now four years old, has never manifested a dread of darkness. A similar statement is made by a careful observer, Dr. Sikorski, with reference to his own children. It seems possible to go through childhood without making acquaintance with this terror, and to acquire it in later life. I know a lady who only acquired the fear toward the age of thirty. "Curiously enough" she writes, "I was never afraid of the dark as a child; but during the last two years I hate to be left alone in the dark, and if I have to enter a dark room, like my study, beyond the reach of the maids from downstairs, I notice a remarkable acceleration in my heartbeat and hurry to strike a light or rush downstairs as quickly as possible."

There is little doubt that when the fear is developed it is apt to become one of the greatest miseries of childhood. We can faintly conjecture, from what Charles Lamb and others have told us about the specters that haunted their nights, what a weighty, crushing terror this may become. Hence, we need not be surprised that the writer of fiction has sought to give it a vivid and adequate description. Victor Hugo, for example, when painting the feelings of little Cosette, who had been sent out alone at night to fetch water from a spring in the wood, says she "felt herself seized by the black enormity of Nature. It was not only terror which possessed her, it was something more terrible even than terror."

Different explanations have been offered of this fear. Locke, who, when writing on educational matters, was rather hard on nurses and servants, puts down the whole of these fears to these wicked persons, "whose usual method is to awe children and keep them in subjection by telling them of Raw Head and Bloody Bones, and such other names as carry with them the idea of something terrible and hurtful, which they have reason to be afraid of when alone, especially in the dark." Rousseau, on the other hand, urges that there is a natural cause. "Accustomed as I am to perceive objects from a distance, and to anticipate their impressions in advance, how is it possible for me, when I