tions that if an
animal approached him he was on no account to hurt it, but merely to
throw his hat at it. The boy promising to obey, the father hastily left
the field. Some minutes later a grey wolf appeared, swimming a stream.
It rushed at the boy, who, mad with terror, forgot his father's
instructions, and struck at it with a pitchfork.

The prongs of the fork, entering the wolf's side, pierced its heart; and
transmutation again taking place, to the horror of all present there lay
on the ground, not the body of a beast, but the corpse of the boy's
father.

In Denmark it is said that if a woman stretches between four sticks the
membrane of a newly born foal, and creeps through it naked, she will
bring forth children without pain, but all the boys will be werwolves
and the girls maras.

As is the case with the werwolf of other countries, the Danish werwolf
retains its human form by day; but after sunset, unlike the werwolf of
any other nationality, it sometimes adopts the shape of a dog on three
legs before it finally metamorphoses into a wolf.

In addition to these methods (alluded to above) of expelling a
lycanthropous spirit in Denmark, there may be added that of addressing
the obsessed person as a werwolf and reproaching him roundly. But as I
have no proof of the effectiveness of this crude mode of exorcism, I
cannot commit myself to any verdict with regard to it.

MARAS

The mara, to which I have briefly alluded in a foregoing chapter, is to
be met with in Denmark almost as often as the werwolf; and the
superphysical property, characteristic of the mara no less than of the
werwolf, justifies me in a somewhat detailed description of the former
here.

A mara is popularly understood to be a woman by day and at night a
spirit that torments human beings and horses by sitting astride them and
causing them nightmare.

In the main I agree with this definition; though I am inclined to think
that the mara is, in reality, less hoydenish and more subtle and complex
than public opinion would have us believe. In all probability maras are
women who have either inherited or, by the practice of Black Magic,
acquired the faculty of a certain species of projection--differing from
the projection which is common to both sexes in the following points,
viz., that it can always be accomplished (during certain hours) at will;
that it is invariably practised with the sole desire to do ill; that the
projected spirit is fully co