THE SERPENT'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 



