It was not a favorite walk of the boy John
Burroughs. He told how, even in his early teens, at dusk, he would
tiptoe around the corner past the graveyard, afraid to run for fear
a gang of ghosts would be at his heels. "When I got down the road
a ways, though, how I would run!" He was always "scairy" if he had
to come along the edge of the woods alone at nightfall, and was
even afraid of the big black hole under the barn in the daytime:
"I was tortured with the thought of what might lurk there in that
great black abyss, and would hustle through my work of cleaning
the stable, working like Hercules, and often sending in 'Cuff,'
the dog, to scare 'em out."
Fed on stories of ghosts and hobgoblins in childhood, his active,
sensitive imagination became an easy prey to these fears. But
we do outgrow some things. In the summer of 1911 this grown-up
boy waxed so bold that he sat in the barn with its black hole
underneath and wrote of "The Phantoms Behind Us." There was still
something Herculean in his task; he looked boldly down into the
black abysms of Time, not without some shrinking, it is true,
saw the "huge first Nothing," faced the spectres as they rose
before him, wrestled with them, and triumphantly conquered by
acknowledging each phantom as a friendly power--a creature on
whose shoulders he had raised himself to higher and higher levels;
he saw that though the blackness was peopled with uncouth and
gigantic forms, out of all these there at last arose the being
Man, who could put all creatures under his feet.
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