I was born and bred, as I have told you twenty times, among books and
those who knew what was in books. I was carefully instructed in things
temporal and spiritual. But up to a considerable maturity of childhood I
believed Raphael and Michel Angelo to have been super-human beings. The
central doctrine of the prevalent religious faith of Christendom was
utterly confused and neutralized in my mind for years by one of those too
common stories of actual life, which I overheard repeated in a whisper.--
Why did I not ask? you will say.--You don't remember the rosy pudency of
sensitive children. The first instinctive movement of the little creatures
is to make a _cache_, and bury in it beliefs, doubts, dreams, hopes, and
terrors. I am uncovering one of these _caches_. Do you think I was
necessarily a greater fool and coward than another?
I was afraid of ships. Why, I could never tell. The masts looked
frightfully tall,--but they were not so tall as the steeple of our old
yellow meeting-house. At any rate, I used to hide my eyes from the sloops
and schooners that were wont to lie at the end of the bridge, and I
confess that traces of this undefined terror lasted very long.--One other
source of alarm had a still more fearful significance. There was a great
wooden HAND,--a glove-maker's sign, which used to swing and creak in the
blast, as it hung from a pillar before a certain shop a mile or two
outside of the city.
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