Courage

Louisa and Frederick have gone to school along the village street. The sun is shining and the two children sing. They sing like the nightingale because their hearts are gay. They sing an old song that their grandmothers sang when they were little girls and which one day their children's children will sing, for songs are frail immortals which fly from lip to lip throughout the ages. The lips that sing them lose their color and are silent one after the other, but the songs are always on the wing. There are songs that come down to us from a time when all the men were shepherds and all the women shepherdesses which tell us of nothing but sheep and wolves.   Louisa and Frederick sing, their mouths round as flowers, and their song rises shrill and clear on the morning air. But suddenly the sound catches in Frederick's wind pipe. What power invisible has strangled the song in this schoolboy throat? It is fear. Each day inevitably, at the end of the village street, he meets the dog that belongs to the big butcher, and each day his heart shrivels and his legs grow weak at the sight. It is not the pig man's dog ever attacks or menaces him. He just sits peaceably on the threshold of his master's shop. But he is black, and his eyes are fixed and bloodshot, and sharp, white teeth show beneath his baboon jaws. He is terrifying. And then he sits there in the midst of all sorts of meat cut up for pies and hashes, and seems the more terrible on that account. Of course no one supposes he has been the cause of all this carnage, but he presides over it. He's a fierce dog, the pig man's. And so, as far away as Frederick can see him in the doorway, he picks up a big stone, following the example of men he has seen arm themselves in this way against surly dogs, and goes hugging the wall of the house across the street from the pig butcher's closely.   This time he has followed this practice, but Louisa mocks at him. She has taken none of these violent precautions, against which people always arm themselves more violently still. No, she doesn't even speak to him, but keeps on singing, only changing her tone in such a mocking way that Frederick grows red to his ears. Then there is great travail in his little head. He understands that he must fear fear as much as danger. And he is afraid to be afraid.  And so, when school is out, and he sees the pig man's dog again, he stalks by that astonished animal proudly. History adds that he looked at Louisa out of the corner of his eye to see if she were looking. It must be admitted that with no ladies or young maidens in the world men might be less brave.