efinable
something made him turn back. That crunching, was it a dog or was
it----? His heart turned sick within him at the bare thought. Again he
listened at the threshold, and again he heard the sounds--gnaw, gnaw,
gnaw--crunch, crunch, crunch! He rapped at first gently, and then
loudly, ever so loudly.

The gnawing at once stopped, but no one answered him. Then he
called--once, twice, thrice: there was no reply. Assured now there was
something amiss, he gripped his rifle, and putting his shoulder to the
door, burst it open. A flood of daylight rushed in, and he saw before
him on the floor the mutilated and half-eaten remains of a woman,
and--did his eyes deceive him or did he see?--crouching in a corner all
ready to spring, two magnificent jaguars. Van Hielen raised his rifle,
but--in less than a second--it fell from his grasp.

Towards him, from the same spot--their small mouths and slender hands
smeared with blood--ran Yarakna and her brother.

FOOTNOTES:

[32:1] A spirit that has never inhabited any material body. Elementals
are a genus of a large order, and include innumerable species.

CHAPTER III

THE SPIRITS OF WERWOLVES

It seems that there is a disposition in certain minds to associate
lycanthropy with the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. A brief
examination of the latter will, however, suffice to show there is very
little analogy between the two.

Transmigration of souls, a metempsychosis, deals solely with the passing
of the soul after death into another mortal form. Lycanthropy confines
itself to the metamorphosis of physical man to animal form only during
man's physical lifetime.

Metempsychosis is a change of condition dependent on the principle of
evolution (_i.e._ evolution upward and retrogressive). Lycanthropy is a
change of condition relative to a property, entirely independent of
evolution. The one is wholly determined by man's spiritual state at the
time of his physical dissolution; the other is simply a faculty of
sense, either handed down to man by his forefathers or acquired by man,
during his lifetime, through the knowledge and practice of magic.

There are absolutely no grounds, other than purely hypothetical ones,
for supposing a werwolf to be a reincarnation; but on the other hand
there is reason to believe that the wolf personality of the werwolf, at
the latter's physical dissolution, remains earthbound in the form of a
lupine phantasm. So that although there