of teasing play, for near an hour under my window. At another he
acted a wolf to his baby brother, whom he had promised never to
frighten again."*

--
* Guiney's Hurrell Froude, p. 8.
--

Anthony was the baby brother, and though this form of teasing was
soon given up, the temper which dictated it remained. Hurrell, it
should be said, inflicted severe discipline upon himself to curb his
own refractory nature. In applying the same to his little brother he
showed that he did not understand the difference between Anthony's
character and his own. But lack of insight and want of sympathy were
among Hurrell's acknowledged defects.

Conceiving that the child wanted spirit, Hurrell once took him up by
the heels, and stirred with his head the mud at the bottom of a
stream. Another time he threw him into deep water out of a boat to
make him manly. But he was not satisfied by inspiring physical
terror. Invoking the aid of the preternatural, he taught his brother
that the hollow behind the house was haunted by a monstrous and
malevolent phantom, to which, in the plenitude of his imagination,
he gave the name of Peningre. Gradually the child discovered that
Peningre was an illusion, and began to suspect that other ideas of
Hurrell's might be illusions too. Superstition is the parent of
scepticism from the cradle to the gave. At the same time his own
faculty of invention was rather stimulated than repressed. He was
encouraged in telling, as children will, imaginative stories of
things which never occurred.