Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/53

 then he attacked with great eloquence the miracles of which the Bible tells us, and which he confessed he could not understand.

Sometimes, however, he seemed to remember that after all I was only a child. He would then take me upon his knee and tell me fairy-stories, such as one tells to children, but he never omitted to add that the stories were not true and that I must promise not to believe them. This I did promise, but always asked for more. The child's mind has a craving for the supernatural, and although terror taken by itself is an uncomfortable sensation, still the shudders produced by the thought of the monstrous and awful have for it a strange fascination. The village people among whom I lived were for the most part superstitious to a degree. They firmly believed in the personal devil with horns and tail, and in witches who were in intimate league with him; and there were even two or three old women in our village to whom the finger of suspicion pointed as being “not quite right.” I also heard some of our neighbors tell of “men of fire” whom they had seen with their eyes walking about the fields at night. These were said to be lost souls condemned for their misdeeds in the flesh to wander about forever in fiery torment. Although I knew perfectly well from my talks with my parents and uncles and Master George that there were no such creatures as witches, and that the “men of fire” were only will-of-the-wisps arising from the vapors of the moorland, nevertheless I found it delightfully gruesome to stare at these old women and cautiously to visit the morass where these terrible “men of fire” were said to hover.

To my friend, Master George, I am also indebted for my first understanding of the word philosopher. There stood in our village street an old deserted house which must once have been a more aristocratic dwelling than its neighbors. It was larger, the beams of its framework were more artistically