THE SERPEINT’S STRANGENESS 165 
sensitive-plant, when I saw it shrink and grow pale 
at the touch of my fingers. Other plants and 
flowers have affected me with a sense of mystery 
in the same way; and throughout the world, 
among inferior or savage races, plants of strange 
forms are often regarded with superstitious fear 
or veneration. Something of this—the mythical 
faculty of the primitive man and of the child— 
remains in all of us, even the most intellectual. 
There is a story told of an atheist who, coming 
from an orchid show, said that he had been con- 
verted to belief in the existence of a devil. A 
feeling, about which he probably knew little, was 
father to the witticism. 
To pass from plants to animals. As a child I 
was powerfully moved at my first meeting with a 
large owl. I was exploring a dimly lighted loft 
in a barn, when, peering into an empty cask, I 
met its eyes fixed on mine—a strange monster of 
a bird with fluffed, tawny plumage, barred and 
spotted with black, and a circular, pale-coloured 
face, and set in it a pair of great luminous yellow 
eyes! My nerves tingled and my hair stood up 
as if I had received an electric shock. Recalling 
this experience, the vividness of the image printed 
on my mind, and the sense of mystery so long 
afterwards associated with this bird, it does not 
seem strange that among all races in all parts of 
the globe it should have been regarded as some- 
thing more than a bird, and supernatural —a 
wise being, something evil and ghostly, a messenger 
