he would notice it, pat it, call it half-mocking, half-jocular
names, and so make it caper with extraordinary delight; sometimes he
would ill-treat it, especially after he had been at the whiskey,
kicking it, beating it, pelting it with stones or lighted fusees.
But whether he treated it well or ill, it loved nothing so much as to be
near him.

I say I became habituated to the Beast People, that a thousand
things which had seemed unnatural and repulsive speedily became
natural and ordinary to me. I suppose everything in existence
takes its colour from the average hue of our surroundings.
Montgomery and Moreau were too peculiar and individual
to keep my general impressions of humanity well defined.
I would see one of the clumsy bovine-creatures who worked the launch
treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself asking,
trying hard to recall, how he differed from some really human
yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours; or I would meet
the Fox-bear woman's vulpine, shifty face, strangely human in its
speculative cunning, and even imagine I had met it before in some
city byway.

Yet every now and then the beast would flash out upon me beyond
doubt or denial. An ugly-looking man, a hunch-backed human savage
to all appearance, squatting in the aperture of one of the dens,
would stretch his arms and yawn, showing with startling suddenness
scissor-edged incisors and sabre-like canines, keen and brilliant
as knives. Or in some narrow pathway, glancing with a transitory
daring into the eyes of some lithe, white-swathed female figure,
I would suddenly see (with a spasmodic revulsion) that she had
slit-like pupils, or glancing down note the curving nail with which
she held her shapeless wrap about her. It is a curious thing, by
the bye, for which I am quite unable to account, that these weird
creatures--the females, I mean--had in the earlier days of my stay an
instinctive sense of their own repulsive clumsiness, and displayed
in consequence a more than human regard for the decency and decorum
of extensive costume.

XVI. HOW THE BEAST FOLK TASTE BLOOD.

MY inexperience as a writer betrays me, and I wander from the thread
of my story.

After I had breakfasted with Montgomery, he took me across
the island to see the fumarole and the source of the hot spring
into whose scalding waters I had blundered on the previous day.
Both of us carried whips and loaded revolvers. While going through
a