" "Could I
see a Jew?" "Yes, very easily," said Mother, lifting me up quickly in
front of the large oval mirror above the sofa.
I uttered a shriek, so that Mother hurriedly put me down again, and my
horror was such that she regretted not having prepared me. Later on she
occasionally spoke about it.
XII.
Other inimical forces in the world cropped up by degrees. When you had
been put to bed early the maids often sat down at the nursery table, and
talked in an undertone until far on into the evening. And then they
would tell stories that were enough to make your hair stand on end. They
talked of ghosts that went about dressed in white, quite noiselessly, or
rattling their chains through the rooms of houses, appeared to people
lying in bed, frightened guilty persons; of figures that stepped out of
their picture-frames and moved across the floor; of the horror of
spending a night in the dark in a church--no one dared do that; of what
dreadful places churchyards were, how the dead in long grave-clothes
rose up from their graves at night and frightened the life out of
people, while the Devil himself ran about the churchyard in the shape of
a black cat. In fact, you could never be sure, when you saw a black cat
towards evening, that the Devil was not inside it. And as easily as
winking the Devil could transform himself into a man and come up behind
the person he had a grudge against.
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