16 THE BOY. 



for mental power or for strength of character. She 

 had, however, one intellectual faculty in extraordinary 

 vigour, to wit, memory, and she loaded it with know- 

 ledge of a peculiarly unprofitable kind. Her belief in 

 fairies, witches, dreams, presentiments, ghosts, was 

 unbounded, and she was restrained by no modern 

 scruples from communicating either her fairy lore, or the 

 faith with which she received it, to her son. Her faith in 

 her legendary personages was inextricably involved with 

 her belief in the angels and spirits of Scripture, and to 

 betray scepticism as to apparitions and fairies was in her 

 view to take part with the Sadducee or the infidel. 

 1 Such was the powerful influence, 5 says Mrs Miller, ' to 

 which little Hugh was subjected for the first six years 

 of his life a kind of education the force of which he 

 himself could scarcely estimate. Add to everything else 

 that much of his mother's sewing was making garments 

 for the dead. Fancy that little low room in the winter 

 evenings, its atmosphere at all times murky from the dark 

 earthen floor, the small windows, the fire on the hearth 

 which, though furnished with a regular chimney, allowed 

 much smoke to escape before it found passage. Fancy 

 little Hugh sitting on a low stool by that hearth-fire, his 

 mother engaged at a large chest which serves her for a 

 table on which stands a single candle. Her work is 

 dressing the shroud and the winding-sheet, the dead 

 irons click incessantly, and her conversation as she passes 

 to and fro to heat her irons at the fire is of the departed, 

 and of mysterious warnings and spectres. Suddenly, as 

 the hour grows late, distinct raps are heard on this chest 

 -the forerunners, she says, of another dissolution. 

 Her tall thin figure is drawn up in an attitude of intense 

 listening for these signs from the unseen world. The 

 child has been surrounded and permeated with the 



