"the word hobbgoblin still chills my spine"

by Rev. Jesse Halsey

One word more about family prayers. I believe it was a bore to my brother and sisters just as it was to me. As a little boy I knelt by father's rocker and while he prayed I squinted with one eye half open out through the tiny panes of bubbled glass and saw all sorts of curious things in the trees and in the houses across the road, distorted by the window panes. Fairy stories were never read to me as a boy, but those window panes and the enforced leisure of family prayers gave me my opportunity. I pity children who have to depend on movies for their imaginative 'frame of reference.'

It's time to get back to Pilgrim's Progress. I remember it as The Book, the only one except the Bible that was available for Sunday use. It had in it a few pictures of the Holy City that I often looked at after my mother died. I was five then. Another picture, a steel engraving, showed Christians passing through the Valley of the Shadow. The very word hobbgoblin still chills my spine, to this hour. But the Valley was beset with them--hobbgoblins. I was afraid to look yet could not forbear.

Father would read by the hour. After mother died his loneliness made him my companion. Night after night he would read me to sleep. Week nights it was history, some poetry like Milton, stories from the Youth's Companion, but chiefly history. That and stories that he had heard Grandfather tell, Indians, the 'Red Coats,' whaling--no end of that from Father and all his cronies. I should say they were a dignified lot, mostly.