Walpole wrote horror novels that tended more towards the psychological rather than supernatural, with a brooding underlying mysticism. The Golden Scarecrow begins: When Hugh Seymour was nine years of age he was sent from Ceylon, where his parents lived, to be educated in England. His relations having, for the most part, settled in foreign countries, he spent his holidays as a very minute and pale-faced paying guest in various houses where other children were of more importance than he, or where children as a race were of no importance at all.