30 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SEALER 



of men and beasts, even of lads no bigger than myself. I doubt 

 if a child ever suffered from immediate senseless fear as I did, 

 while my whole soul was given to warlike projects. What I have 

 seen in later life leads me to believe that this is a common human 

 condition, and that the grown men who glory in the images of 

 war are led thereto by their sense of their own timidity. This 

 seems the likelier from an incident which ended my youthful 

 dreams of battle. It has a certain psychologic interest and it is 

 the first distinct turning-point in my mental state. So, though 

 in itself a trifle, it needs be told. 



Until I was about twelve years old, I was so far possessed by 

 fear that I was much put upon by the lads of my own age. This 

 cowardice seems to have related only to contacts with people, 

 for as a tree-climber I was daring and successful. I remember 

 the pleasure it gave me to scale a lofty beech and allow myself 

 to fall through the boughs, trusting to make good my hold 

 before I came to the ground. This I was accustomed to do 

 alone, so that there was no vaunting in the performance. The 

 sense of this childish pleasure was so fixed in memory that to 

 this day I never see a tree well shaped for the hazard without 

 desiring to try it once again. Whatever was the basis of the 

 state of mind, it possessed me sorely until a crisis came. A 

 negro servant, a mulatto belonging to a kinsman who dwelt near 

 my home, amused himself by bullying me in a brutal manner so 

 that my life became unsupportable. So with a newly awakened 

 spirit I determined to end with him, fully expecting to be killed ; 

 be it said that my fear was not of death, a fear from which I 

 have never suffered. I lay in wait for the fellow on the street on 

 a moonlight night. When the bully, who was a sturdy fellow of 

 twice my size and about twenty years old, tried to seize me, I 

 managed with a quick unexpected rush to bring him down and 

 to beat him on the head with a stone, so that he had to be car- 

 ried off and was for some time in a bad state. It was thought 

 that he would die, but he fortunately recovered. In this com- 

 bat for the first and only time in my life I felt that strange 



