"It's all perfectly sane and splendid," I said, "and I'm glad to have you back for supper with us, and the billows out yonder are doubtless all that you say, for an afternoon's lie-up, only I venture to ask—what if a grey nurse should happen in from the lower islands?"
"You don't think about them," he said.
That's about all there is to the fear subject. You don't let it get you. There is nothing worth fearing in or above or under the plane of manifestation.... So I tried that out in deep water. The old horrors succumbed like the fear of the precipice, but not so readily, quite. One can imagine keenly in the dim deep; the touch of sea-weed quickens all the monsters of the mind....
There's nothing fit to be afraid of, unless it is the self. When we get the ape and the tiger, the peacock and the porpoise, the lizard and the shark and the carcajou of our own natures mastered, there isn't anything left to do but to tally them off outside, a friendly finish with them all. No menagerie is complete as man's, and each of us favours some species from time to time.
I have thought much about fear. In another place I told how we have overcome inertia; how we developed senses through the hard administry of fear and hunger, anger and the rest. Now, however, these must be overcome.... One of the last physical fears to let go in my case is that for the hangman's rope. I think Roger Casement really wanted the axe in preference to the hemp. Steadily facing a repulsion, it surely vanishes.
The point of it all is that you can teach self-command to the children.... I took a girl of fourteen to my precipice—left her there standing on the very edge. After a few minutes I called. Her face was calm as if she had gazed from a porch....
"Did you feel any fear?" I asked.
"Only yours for me," she answered.
It was very true. I had the thing whipped for myself, but it had been hard to leave her there.
Finally I took the smaller boys out for a test. They didn't know I was testing them. Children haven't the fear of height such as we put on. I recalled a score of episodes of my own boy-days, in which I startled the elders by Sam Patch imitations. Also I have put the young ones through some deep water affairs....