venerable. These objects naturally raise seriousness and attention; and
when night heightens the awfulness of the place, and pours out her
supernumerary horrors upon every thing in it, I do not at all wonder
that weak minds fill it with spectres and apparitions.

Mr. _Locke_, in his chapter of the Association of Ideas, has very
curious remarks to show how, by the prejudice of education, one idea
often introduces into the mind a whole set that bear no resemblance to
one another in the nature of things. Among several examples of this
kind, he produces the following instance. _The ideas of goblins and
sprights have really no more to do with darkness than light: Yet let but
a foolish maid inculcate these often on the mind of a child, and raise
them there together, possibly he shall never be able to separate them
again so long as he lives; but darkness shall ever afterwards bring with
it those frightful ideas, and they shall be so joined, that he can no
more bear the one than the other._

As I was walking in this solitude, where the dusk of the evening
conspired with so many other occasions of terror, I observed a cow
grazing not far from me, which an imagination that was apt to
_startle_ might easily have construed into a black horse without an
head: And I dare say the poor footman lost his wits upon some such
trivial occasion.

My friend Sir ROGER has often told me with a good deal of mirth, that at
his first coming to his estate he found three parts of his house
altogether useless; that the best room in it had the reputation of being
haunted, and by that means was locked up; that noises had been heard in
his long gallery, so that he could not get a servant to enter it after
eight o'clock at night; that the door of one of the chambers was nailed