with me, and he prevailed against
me, and he plucked my soul from my bosom, and he said, 'Go, search and
kill'--and--and lo, I was a wolf upon the moor.

"The dry grass crackled beneath my tread. The darkness of the night
was heavy and it oppressed me. Strange horrors tortured my soul, and
it groaned and groaned, gaoled in that wolfish body. The wind
whispered to me; with its myriad voices it spake to me and said, 'Go,
search and kill.' And above these voices sounded the hideous laughter
of an old man. I fled the moor--whither I knew not, nor knew I what
motive lashed me on.

"I came to a river and I plunged in. A burning thirst consumed me, and
I lapped the waters of the river--they were waves of flame, and they
flashed around me and hissed, and what they said was, 'Go, search and
kill,' and I heard the old man's laughter again.

"A forest lay before me with its gloomy thickets and its sombre
shadows--with its ravens, its vampires, its serpents, its reptiles, and
all its hideous brood of night. I darted among its thorns and crouched
amid the leaves, the nettles, and the brambles. The owls hooted at me
and the thorns pierced my flesh. 'Go, search and kill,' said
everything. The hares sprang from my pathway; the other beasts ran
bellowing away; every form of life shrieked in my ears--the curse was
on me--I was the werewolf.

"On, on I went with the fleetness of the wind, and my soul groaned in
its wolfish prison, and the winds and the waters and the trees bade me,
'Go, search and kill, thou accursed brute; go, search and kill.'

"Nowhere was there pity for the wolf; what mercy, thus, should I, the
werewolf, show? The curse was on me and it filled me with a hunger and
a thirst for blood. Skulking on my way within myself I cried, 'Let me
have blood, oh, let me have human blood, that this wrath may be
appeased, that this curse may be removed.'

"At last I came to the sacred grove. Sombre loomed the poplars, the
oaks frowned upon me. Before me stood an old man--'twas he, grizzled
and taunting, whose curse I bore. He feared me not. All other living
things fled before me, but the old man feared me not. A maiden stood
beside him. She did not see me, for she was blind.

"Kill, kill,' cried the old man, and he pointed at the girl beside him.

"Hell raged within me--the curse impelled me--I sprang at her throat.
I heard the old man's laughter once more, and then--then I awoke,
trembling, cold, horrified