Even in my earliest years my imagination was very vivid.  When I was put to bed in the evening the rafters above me began to crawl, from every nook and corner of the room distorted visages made grimaces, and the most familiar objects, such as the cane on which I myself used to ride, the foot of the table, yes, even the coverlet on my bed with its flowers and figures, grew strange and filled me with terror.  I believe it is well to distinguish here between the vague general fear, which is natural to all children without exception, and a greater one which embodies its terrifying images in clear-cut distinct forms and really makes them objective to the young soul.  The former fear was shared by my brother, who lay beside me, but his eyes always closed very soon and then he slept quietly until bright daylight; the latter tormented me alone, and not only did it keep sleep far from me, but when sleep finally came, often frightened it away again and made me call for help in the middle of the night.  How deeply the phantasms of this same fear impressed themselves upon me can be gathered from the fact that they return in full force in every serious illness.  As soon as the feverishly seething blood rushes over my brain and drowns my consciousness, the oldest devils, driving out and disarming all laterborn ones, come back again, and that best shows, without doubt, how they must once have tortured me.

But by day, as well, my imagination was unusually, and perhaps unhealthily, active.  Ugly people, for example, whom my brother laughed at and mimicked, filled me with dread.  A little hunch-backed tailor—­on either side of whose triangular, deathly-pale face, immoderately long ears stood out, ears moreover which were bright red and transparent—­could not pass by without my running with screams into the house; and it almost caused my death when he once, in a passion, followed me, scolding and calling me a stupid youngster, and upbraiding my mother because he thought she was making him play the bug-bear in her domestic discipline.  I could not endure the sight of a bone and buried even the smallest one that came to light in our garden; nay later, when in Susanna’s school, I obliterated with my nails the word “rib” in my catechism, because it always brought before me the disgusting object which it designated as vividly as though the object itself lay there in repulsive decay before my eyes.  On the other hand, a rose-leaf, which a breeze blew to me over the hedge, was as much to me as—­nay, more than the rose itself was to others, and words like tulip and lily, cherry and apricot, apple and pear, immediately transplanted me into spring, summer, and autumn; so that in the primer I liked to spell aloud the pieces in which they occurred better than any others, and grew angry each time when it was not my turn to do so.  Only, unhappily, in the world one needs the diminishing glass much oftener than the magnifying, and this holds good even of the beautiful days of youth, except in very rare