l6o IDLEHURST : 



go to Widda Blackman at Catstails. I can find no 

 other trace of belief in the occult in the village. 

 Gervase thinks it is want of imagination ; I fancy it 

 is something worse than that want of heart, exhibited 

 in the last degree. Even so I can rejoice at the dis- 

 appearance of the miserable tyranny of grimmer 

 superstitions. My Lincolnshire nurse taught me, as 

 a nervous small boy, all her lore of signs and portents ; 

 and I remember the sickness of terror (to this day 

 not quite worn out, but sometimes rising, a thin, un- 

 comfortable spectre) at spying a winding-sheet in the 

 candle, or hearing a dog howling in the awful dark 

 hours when I ought to have been safe in the snug 

 citadel of dreams. Amongst the rest, Letty Colbatch 

 taught me that an owl portended a death ; and when 

 once in a country museum I came upon a strix flam- 

 mea in a glass case, my small intellectuals sweated 

 in anguished question whether a stuffed owl was a 

 real portent ; the dim hope that the spell was broken 

 failing before the stare of his yellow glassy eye. 

 Looking back, after Elia's manner, on that small boy 

 as another self, I could almost cry for him now. 

 Best-hearted Letty, what torment you taught me ! 

 The Rector is with me as to the cause of the general 

 decay of superstition ; but it is a subject he hates to 

 talk about offhand. There is among the gentry a 



