In no other way can I explain it.
Again, as a child, I was once sitting at dinner with my parents,
reading an old bound-up Saturday Magazine, looking at the pictures,
and waiting for dessert. I turned a page, and saw a picture of a
Saint, lying on the ground, holding up a cross, and a huge and
cloudy fiend with vast bat-like wings bending over him, preparing
to clutch him, but deterred by the sacred emblem. That was a really
terrible shock. I turned the page hastily, and said nothing, though
it deprived me of speech and appetite. My father noticed my
distress, and asked if I felt unwell, but I said "No." I got
through dessert somehow; but then I had to say good-night, go out
into the dimly-lit hall, slip the volume back into the bookcase,
and get upstairs. I tore up the staircase, feeling the air full of
wings and clutching hands. That was too bad ever to be spoken of;
and as I did not remember which volume it was, I was never able to
look at the set of magazines again for fear of encountering it; and
strange to say some years afterwards, when I was an Eton boy, I
looked curiously for the picture, and again experienced the same
overwhelming horror.
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