ne had at the
question--"Don't you know that these roads are infested by robbers?"

The scene of the romance was laid in Thessaly, the original land of
witchcraft, and took one up and down its mountains, and into its old
weird towns, haunts of magic and [58] incantation, where all the more
genuine appliances of the black art, left behind her by Medea when she
fled through that country, were still in use. In the city of Hypata,
indeed, nothing seemed to be its true self--"You might think that
through the murmuring of some cadaverous spell, all things had been
changed into forms not their own; that there was humanity in the
hardness of the stones you stumbled on; that the birds you heard
singing were feathered men; that the trees around the walls drew their
leaves from a like source. The statues seemed about to move, the walls
to speak, the dumb cattle to break out in prophecy; nay! the very sky
and the sunbeams, as if they might suddenly cry out." Witches are there
who can draw down the moon, or at least the lunar virus--that white
fluid she sheds, to be found, so rarely, "on high, heathy places: which
is a poison. A touch of it will drive men mad."

And in one very remote village lives the sorceress Pamphile, who turns
her neighbours into various animals. What true humour in the scene
where, after mounting the rickety stairs, Lucius, peeping curiously
through a chink in the door, is a spectator of the transformation of
the old witch herself into a bird, that she may take flight to the
object of her affections--into an owl! "First she stripped off every
rag she had. Then opening a certain chest she took from it many small
boxes, and removing the lid [59] of one of them, rubbed herself over
for a long time, from head to foot, with an ointment it contained, and
after much low muttering to her lamp, began to jerk at last and shake
her limbs. And as her limbs moved to and fro, out burst the soft
feathers: stout wings came forth to view: the nose grew hard and
hooked: her nails were crooked into claws; and Pamphile was an owl. She
uttered a queasy screech; and, leaping little by little from the
ground, making trial of herself, fled presently, on full wing, out of
doors."

By clumsy imitation of this process, Lucius, the hero of the romance,
transforms himself, not as he had intended into a showy winged
creature, but into the animal which has given name to the book; for
throughout it there runs a vein of racy, homely