Any one examining these cupboards by daylight would have found
that they contained innocuous cricket-bats and stumps, croquet-
mallets and balls, and sets of bowls. But as soon as the shades of
night fell, these harmless sporting accessories were changed by
some mysterious and malign agency into grizzly bears, and grizzly
bears are notoriously the fiercest of their species. It was
advisable to walk very quickly, but quietly, past the lair of the
grizzlies, for they would have gobbled up a little boy in one
second. Immediately after the bears' den came the culminating
terror of all--the haunt of the wicked little hunchbacks. These
malignant little beings inhabited an arched and recessed cross-
passage. It was their horrible habit to creep noiselessly behind
their victims, tip...tip...tip-toeing silently but swiftly behind
their prey, and then ... with a sudden spring they threw
themselves on to little boys' backs, and getting their arms round
their necks, they remorselessly throttled the life out of them. In
the early "sixties" there was a perfect epidemic of so-called
"garrotting" in London.
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