to the lurching dog at my side.

As the carelessness and disorganisation increased from day to day,
the lane of dwelling places, at no time very sweet, became so
loathsome that I left it, and going across the island made myself
a hovel of boughs amid the black ruins of Moreau's enclosure.
Some memory of pain, I found, still made that place the safest from
the Beast Folk.

It would be impossible to detail every step of the lapsing of
these monsters,--to tell how, day by day, the human semblance left them;
how they gave up bandagings and wrappings, abandoned at last every
stitch of clothing; how the hair began to spread over the exposed limbs;
how their foreheads fell away and their faces projected;
how the quasi-human intimacy I had permitted myself with some
of them in the first month of my loneliness became a shuddering
horror to recall.

The change was slow and inevitable. For them and for me it came
without any definite shock. I still went among them in safety,
because no jolt in the downward glide had released the increasing
charge of explosive animalism that ousted the human day by day.
But I began to fear that soon now that shock must come.
My Saint-Bernard-brute followed me to the enclosure every night,
and his vigilance enabled me to sleep at times in something like peace.
The little pink sloth-thing became shy and left me, to crawl back
to its natural life once more among the tree-branches. We were in just
the state of equilibrium that would remain in one of those "Happy Family"
cages which animal-tamers exhibit, if the tamer were to leave it
for ever.

Of course these creatures did not decline into such beasts as
the reader has seen in zoological gardens,--into ordinary bears,
wolves, tigers, oxen, swine, and apes. There was still something
strange about each; in each Moreau had blended this animal with that.
One perhaps was ursine chiefly, another feline chiefly, another
bovine chiefly; but each was tainted with other creatures,--a kind
of generalised animalism appearing through the specific dispositions.
And the dwindling shreds of the humanity still startled me every
now and then,--a momentary recrudescence of speech perhaps,
an unexpected dexterity of the fore-feet, a pitiful attempt to
walk erect.

I too must have undergone strange changes. My clothes hung about
me as yellow rags, through whose rents showed the tanned skin.
My hair grew long, and became matted together. I am told that
even n