and, is in itself a fact sufficient to warrant a
faith in these things, and to establish a strong probability of their
reality. It is not for me, or such as I am, to question the opinion of
these wise men of the West, but if ghosts, and phantoms, and witchcraft
and hag-ridings are to be accepted on such grounds, I must be allowed to
put in a plea, for similar reasons, in favour of the Loup Garou, the
Were-Tiger, and all their gruesome family. Wherever there are wild
beasts to prey upon the sons of men, there also is found the belief that
the worst and most rapacious of the man-eaters are themselves human
beings, who have been driven to temporarily assume the form of an
animal, by the aid of the Black Art, in order to satisfy their
overpowering lust for blood. This belief, which seeks to account for the
extraordinary rapacity of an animal by tracing its origin to a human
being, would seem to be based upon an extremely cynical appreciation of
the blood-thirsty character of our race. The white man and the brown,
the yellow and the black, independently, and without receiving the idea
from one another, have all found the same explanation for the like
phenomena, all apparently recognising the truth of the Malay proverb,
that we are like unto the _toman_ fish that preys upon its own kind.
This general opinion, which seems the more worthy of acceptance in that
it is the reverse of flattering to the very races that have formed this
curious estimate of their own unlovely character, might by the ignorant
and vulgar be supposed to be the real basis of the belief of which I
speak, were it not for that dictum of the Society for Psychical Research
to which I have above referred. But bowing to this authority, we must
accept the Loup Garou and all its kith and kin as stern realities, and
not attribute it, as we might perhaps have been inclined to do, to a
deadly fear of wild beasts, coupled to a thorough knowledge of the
unpleasant qualities of primitive human nature.

Educated Europeans, who live in a land where even Nature, when she can
be seen for the houses, has had man's hall-mark scarred deep into her
face, are apt to think that the Age of Superstition has gone to fill the
lumber-room of the past. Occasionally they are awakened from this belief
by the torturing of a witch in a cabin by an Irish-bog; but even an
event so near home as that is powerless to altogether disabuse their
minds of their preconceived opinion. The difficulty r