a savage snarl; the teeth sharp and
white; the eyes light green; the ears pointed. The expression of the
face was diabolically malignant, and as it gazed straight at me my
horror was as intense as my wonder. This it seemed to notice, for a
look of savage exultation crept into its eyes, and it raised one hand--a
slender hand, like that of a woman, though with prodigiously long and
curved finger-nails--menacingly, as if about to dash in the window-pane.
Remembering what my grandfather had told me about evil spirits, I
crossed myself; but as this had no effect, and I really feared the thing
would get at me, I ran out of the kitchen and shut and locked the door,
remaining in the hall till the family returned. My grandfather was much
upset when I told him what had happened, and attributed my failure to
make the spirit depart to my want of faith. Had he been there, he
assured me, he would soon have got rid of it; but he nevertheless made
me help him remove the bones from the kitchen, and we reinterred them in
the very spot where we had found them, and where, for aught I know to
the contrary, they still lie."

The peasant class in all parts of the British Isles are so sensitive to
ridicule, and so suspicious of being "got at," that it is very difficult
to extract any information from them with regard to the superphysical.
At first they invariably deny their belief in spirits, and it is only by
dint of the utmost persuasion unaccompanied by any air of
patronage--which the Celtic peasant detests--that one is finally able to
loosen their tongues as to uncanny occurrences, hauntings, and rumours
of hauntings, in their neighbourhood. In eliciting information of this
nature, I have, I think, by reason of my tactful manner, often succeeded
where others have failed.

In a village at the foot of Ben MacDhui a shepherd of the name of Colin
Graeme informed me that he remembered hearing his grandfather, who died
at the age of ninety, speak of an old man called Tam McPherson whom
he--the grandfather--had known intimately as a boy. This old man, so
Colin's grandfather said, had perfect recollections of a man in the
village called Saunderson being suspected of being a werwolf. He used to
describe Saunderson as "a mon with evil, leerie eyes, and eyebrows that
met in a point over his nose"; and went on to say that Saunderson lived
in a cave in the mountains where his forefathers, also suspected of
being werwolves, had lived before him, and th