Its presence annoyed him,
though he could hardly have had a quieter neigh-
bour. He was conscious, too, of a vague, indefinable
feeling that was new to him. It was not fear, but
rather a sense of the supernatural--in which he did
not at all believe.
'I have inherited it,' he said to himself. 'I sup-
pose it will require a thousand ages--perhaps ten
thousand--for humanity to outgrow this feeling.
Where and when did it originate? Away back, prob-
ably, in what is called the cradle of the human race
--the plains of Central Asia. What we inherit as a
superstition our barbarous ancestors must have held
as a reasonable conviction. Doubtless they believed
themselves justified by facts whose nature we can-
not even conjecture in thinking a dead body a malign
thing endowed with some strange power of mis-
chief, with perhaps a will and a purpose to exert it.
Possibly they had some awful form of religion of
which that was one of the chief doctrines, sedulously
taught by their priesthood, as ours teach the im-
mortality of the soul. As the Aryans moved slowly
on, to and through the Caucasus passes, and spread
over Europe, new conditions of life must have re-
sulted in the formulation of new religions. The old
belief in the malevolence of the dead body was lost
from the creeds and even perished from tradition
but it left its heritage of terror, which is transmitted
from generation to generation--is as much a part
of us as are our blood and bones.
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