Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/364

352 itself to images of heaven, with trees, birds, and other pretty things, and giving but little heed to the horrors of hell. In less sunny climes than California children may not perhaps be such little optimists, and it is probable that graphic descriptions of hell fire have sent many a creepy thrill of horror along a child's tender nerves. Still, it may be said that, owing to the fortunate circumstance that children have much less fear of fire than many animals, the imagery in which eternal punishment is wont to be bodied forth does not work so powerfully as one might expect on a child's imagination. Then it is noticeable that children in general are but little affected by fear at the sight or the thought of death. The child C had a passing dread of being buried, but his young, hopeful heart refused to credit the fact of that far-off calamity. This, too, is no small deduction to be made from the burden of children's fear.

Not only so, when fear is apt to be excited, Nature has provided the small, timorous person with other instincts which tend to mitigate and even to neutralize it. It is a happy circumstance that the most prolific excitant of fear, the presentation of something new and uncanny, is also provocative of another feeling—that of curiosity, with its impulse to look and examine. Even animals are sometimes divided in the presence of something strange between fear and curiosity; and children's curiosity is much more lively than theirs. A very tiny child, on first making acquaintance with some form of physical pain, as a bump on the head, will deliberately repeat the experience by knocking its head against something, as if experimenting and watching the effect. A clearer case of curiosity overpowering fear is that of a child who, after pulling the tail of a cat in a bush and getting scratched, proceeded to dive into the bush again. Still more interesting here are the gradual transitions from actual fear before the new and strange to bold inspection. The behavior of one of these small persons on the arrival at his house of a strange dog, of a colored foreigner, Hindu, or some. other startling novelty, is a pretty and amusing sight. The first overpowering shyness and shrinking back to the mother's breast, followed by cautious peeps, then by bolder outreachings of head and arms, mark the stages by which curiosity and interest gain on fear and finally leave it far behind. Very soon we know the small, timorous creatures will grow into bold, adventurous lads, loving nothing so much as to probe the awful mysteries of flame and gunpowder and other alarming things.