I became staggered and perplexed, a sceptic in long coats.  The pretty Bible stories which I had read, or heard read in church, lost their purity and sincerity of impression, and were turned into so many historic or chronologic theses to be defended against whatever impugners.  I was not to disbelieve them, but—­the next thing to that—­I was to be quite sure that some one or other would or had disbelieved them.  Next to making a child an infidel, is the letting him know that there are infidels at all.  Credulity is the man’s weakness, but the child’s strength.  O, how ugly sound scriptural doubts from the mouth of a babe and a suckling!—­I should have lost myself in these mazes, and have pined away, I think, with such unfit sustenance as these husks afforded, but for a fortunate piece of ill-fortune, which about this time befel me.  Turning over the picture of the ark with too much haste, I unhappily made a breach in its ingenious fabric—­driving my inconsiderate fingers right through the two larger quadrupeds—­the elephant, and the camel—­that stare (as well they might) out of the two last windows next the steerage in that unique piece of naval architecture.  Stackhouse was henceforth locked up, and became an interdicted treasure.  With the book, the objections and solutions gradually cleared out of my head, and have seldom returned since in any force to trouble me.—­But there was one impression which I had imbibed from Stackhouse, which no lock or bar could shut out, and which was destined to try my childish nerves rather more seriously.—­That detestable picture!

I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors.  The night-time solitude, and the dark, were my hell.  The sufferings I endured in this nature would justify the expression.  I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life—­so far as memory serves in things so long ago—­without an assurance, which realized its own prophecy, of seeing some frightful spectre.  Be old Stackhouse then acquitted in part, if I say, that to his picture of the Witch raising up Samuel—­(O that old man covered with a mantle!) I owe—­not my midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy—­but the shape and manner of their visitation.  It was he who dressed up for me a hag that nightly sate upon my pillow—­a sure bed-fellow, when my aunt or my maid was far from me.  All day long, while the book was permitted me, I dreamed waking over his delineation, and at night (if I may use so bold an expression) awoke into sleep, and found the vision true.  I durst not, even in the day-light, once enter the chamber where I slept, without my face turned to the window, aversely from the bed where my witch-ridden pillow was.—­Parents do not know what they do when they leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the dark.  The feeling about for a friendly arm—­the hoping for a familiar voice—­when they wake screaming—­and find none to soothe them—­what a terrible shaking it is to their poor nerves!  The keeping