se to cromlechs, ancient burial-grounds, woods, or moors
are full of idiots, leads me to suppose that vampires often frequent the
same spots as barrowvians, vagrarians and other types of elementals.
Whilst, on the other hand, since many densely crowded centres have fully
their share of idiots, I am led to believe that vampires are equally
attracted by populous districts, and that, in short, unlike barrowvians
and vagrarians, they can be met with pretty nearly everywhere. And now
for examples.

A man I know, who spends most of his time in Germany, once had a strange
experience when staying in the neighbourhood of the Hartz mountains. One
sultry evening in August he was walking in the country, and noticed a
perambulator with a white figure, which he took to be that of a
remarkably tall nursemaid, bending over it. As he drew nearer, however,
he found that he had been mistaken. The figure was nothing human; it had
no limbs; it was cylindrical. A faint, sickly sound of sucking caused my
friend to start forward with an exclamation of horror, and as he did so,
the phantasm glided away from the perambulator and disappeared among the
trees. The baby, my friend assured me, was a mere bag of bones, with a
ghastly, grinning anaemic face. Again, when touring in Hungary, he had a
similar experience. He was walking down a back street in a large,
thickly populated town, when he beheld a baby lying on the hot and
sticky pavement with a queer-looking object stooping over it. Wondering
what on earth the thing was, he advanced rapidly, and saw, to his
unmitigated horror, that it was a phantasm with a limbless, cylindrical
body, a huge flat, pulpy head, and protruding, luminous lips, which were
tightly glued to the infant's ears; and again my friend heard a faint,
sickly sound of sucking, and a sound more hideously nauseating, he
informed me, could not be imagined. He was too dumbfounded to act; he
could only stare; and the phantasm, after continuing its loathsome
occupation for some seconds, leisurely arose, and moving away with a
gliding motion, vanished in the yard of an adjacent house. The child did
not appear to be human, but a concoction of half a dozen diminutive
bestialities, and as my friend gazed at it, too fascinated for the
moment to tear himself away, it smiled up at him with the hungry,
leering smile of vampirism and idiocy.

So much for vampires in the country and in crowded cities, but, as I
have already remarked, they are