She has many
personalities, like the queer women we read about in French treatises on
hysterics and nervous diseases. These stories are "fairy tales of
science," by a man of science, who is also a humourist, and has a touch
of the poet, and of the old fathers who were afraid of witches. The
"blend" is singular enough, and not without its originality of
fascination.
Though a man of science Dr. Holmes apparently took an imaginative
pleasure in all shapes of superstition that he could muster. I must
quote a passage from "The Professor at the Breakfast Table," as
peculiarly illustrative of his method, and his ways of half accepting the
abnormally romantic--accepting just enough for pleasure, like Sir Walter
Scott. Connected with the extract is a curious anecdote.
"I think I am a little superstitious. There were two things, when I was
a boy, that diabolised my imagination,--I mean, that gave me a distinct
apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled round the
neighbourhood where I was born and bred. The first was a series of marks
called the 'Devil's footsteps.' These were patches of sand in the
pastures, where no grass grew, where even the low-bush blackberry, the
'dewberry,' as our Southern neighbours call it, in prettier and more
Shakespearian language, did not spread its clinging creepers, where even
the pale, dry, sadly-sweet 'everlasting' could not grow, but all was bare
and blasted.
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