to the creature. This belief is
widely diffused; it meets us in Europe, Asia, and Africa. For example,
Olaus Magnus tells us that in Livonia, not many years before he wrote, a
noble lady had a dispute with her slave on the subject of were-wolves,
she doubting whether there were any such things, and he maintaining that
there were. To convince her he retired to a room, from which he soon
appeared in the form of a wolf. Being chased by the dogs into the forest
and brought to bay, the wolf defended himself fiercely, but lost an eye
in the struggle. Next day the slave returned to his mistress in human
form but with only one eye.[758] Again, it happened in the year 1588
that a gentleman in a village among the mountains of Auvergne, looking
out of the window one evening, saw a friend of his going out to hunt. He
begged him to bring him back some of his bag, and his friend said that
he would. Well, he had not gone very far before he met a huge wolf. He
fired and missed it, and the animal attacked him furiously, but he stood
on his guard and with an adroit stroke of his hunting knife he cut off
the right fore-paw of the brute, which thereupon fled away and he saw it
no more. He returned to his friend, and drawing from his pouch the
severed paw of the wolf he found to his horror that it was turned into a
woman's hand with a golden ring on one of the fingers. His friend
recognized the ring as that of his own wife and went to find her. She
was sitting by the fire with her right arm under her apron. As she
refused to draw it out, her husband confronted her with the hand and the
ring on it. She at once confessed the truth, that it was she in the form
of a were-wolf whom the hunter had wounded. Her confession was confirmed
by applying the severed hand to the stump of her arm, for the two fitted
exactly. The angry husband delivered up his wicked wife to justice; she
was tried and burnt as a witch.[759] It is said that a were-wolf,
scouring the streets of Padua, was caught, and when they cut off his
four paws he at once turned into a man, but with both his hands and feet
amputated.[760] Again, in a farm of the French district of Beauce, there
was once a herdsman who never slept at home. These nocturnal absences
naturally attracted attention and set people talking. At the same time,
by a curious coincidence, a wolf used to prowl round the farm every
night and to excite the dogs in the farmyard to fury by thrusting his
snout derisively thro