struggle luckily,
or unluckily for the unfortunate lady, contrived to cut off one of its
fore-paws. This trophy he placed in his pocket, and made the best of
his way homewards in safety. On the road he met a friend, to whom he
exhibited a bleeding paw, or rather (as it now appeared) a woman's hand,
upon which was a wedding-ring. His wife's ring was at once recognized by
the other. His suspicions aroused, he immediately went in search of his
wife, who was found sitting by the fire in the kitchen, her arm hidden
beneath her apron, when the husband, seizing her by the arm, found his
terrible suspicions verified. The bleeding stump was there, evidently
just fresh from the wound. She was given into custody, and in the event
was burned at Riom, in presence of thousands of spectators." [84]

Sometimes a werewolf was cured merely by recognizing him while in his
brute shape. A Swedish legend tells of a cottager who, on entering the
forest one day without recollecting to say his Patter Noster, got into
the power of a Troll, who changed him into a wolf. For many years his
wife mourned him as dead. But one Christmas eve the old Troll, disguised
as a beggarwoman, came to the house for alms; and being taken in and
kindly treated, told the woman that her husband might very likely appear
to her in wolf-shape. Going at night to the pantry to lay aside a joint
of meat for tomorrow's dinner, she saw a wolf standing with its paws on
the window-sill, looking wistfully in at her. "Ah, dearest," said she,
"if I knew that thou wert really my husband, I would give thee a bone."
Whereupon the wolf-skin fell off, and her husband stood before her in
the same old clothes which he had on the day that the Troll got hold of
him.

In Denmark it was believed that if a woman were to creep through a
colt's placental membrane stretched between four sticks, she would for
the rest of her life bring forth children without pain or illness; but
all the boys would in such case be werewolves, and all the girls Maras,
or nightmares. In this grotesque superstition appears that curious
kinship between the werewolf and the wife or maiden of supernatural
race, which serves admirably to illustrate the nature of both
conceptions, and the elucidation of which shall occupy us throughout the
remainder of this paper.

It is, perhaps, needless to state that in the personality of the
nightmare, or Mara, there was nothing equine. The Mara was a female
demon, [85] who would