Lizards are caught in nooses and then tied by one leg and made to
run on the remaining three; or secured by a cord round the neck and
swung about in the air--mighty good sport, this; or deprived of their
tails and given to the baby or cat to play with; or dragged along at the
end of a string, like a reluctant pig that is led to market. There are
quite a number of ways of making lizards feel at home.
With snakes the procedure is simple. They are killed; treated to that
self-same system to which they used to treat us in our arboreal days
when the glassy eye of the serpent, gleaming through the branches, will
have caused our fur to stand on end with horror. No beast provokes human
hatred like that old coiling serpent. Long and cruel must have been his
reign for the memory to have lingered--how many years? Let us say, in
order to be on the safe side, a million. Here, then, is another ghost of
the past, a daylight ghost.
And look around you; the world is full of them. We live amid a legion of
ancestral terrors which creep from their limbo and peer in upon our
weaker moments, ready to make us their prey. A man whose wits are not
firmly rooted in earth, in warm friends and warm food, might well live a
life of ceaseless trepidation. Many do. They brood over their immortal
soul--a ghost. Others there are, whose dreams have altogether devoured
their realities. These live, for the most part, in asylums.
There flits, along this very shore, a ghost of another kind--that of
Shelley.
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