As a child she had scarcely any religious impressions. Of course she said her prayers; they all did, at the mother's knee, before Sleepy Time came; but that is not saying that she prayed, or even dimly understood the meaning of the word.
At the top of the backstairs, in a dim old corridor, over the wooden bin for the fuel used in that part of the house, a piece of plaster had fallen from the whitewashed wall, about the size, and something in the shape of, a man's head, seen in profile. This the children endowed with awful and supernatural qualities, and entitled it the Boody Man; though I have never been able to discover what the name signified, or how it originated. They crept on tiptoe, and with bated breath, to gaze upon this profile. Then, seized with sudden and unreasoning panic, they would flee trembling from its presence.
Even yet our heroine can recall the chill at her heart, as her trembling little body was carried swiftly away on the flying feet of terror. No pause would they make until, a timid little band, the children stood shaking against the wall, at the extreme end of the corridor,—remaining there, however, only long enough to screw their courage up sufficiently to repeat the same experiment, always with the same result.
