“In vain he attempted to speak; from that very instant His jaws were bespluttered with foam, and only he thirsted For blood, as he ranged amongst flocks and panted for slaughter. His vesture was changed into hair, his limbs became crooked, A wolf—he retains yet large trace of his ancient expression, Hoary he is as afore, his countenance rabid, His eyes glitter savagely still, the picture of fury.”[30] Euanthes, an early Greek writer, tells a very circumstantial story indeed of a certain tribe where one of its members must each year be chosen by lot to become a wolf. Why this should be at all necessary he does not stop to explain. The conditions are very precise. The day and the man having been selected he is taken to the border of a large lake, and his clothes removed, and hung upon an oak tree. He then swims across the lake and disappears into the gloomy woods that come down on the further side to the water’s edge, and then and there changes into a wolf. Should he forbear for nine years to eat the flesh of man he may return to the lake and recross it, changing back, as he lands, into his manhood again, and only differing from his former self in the fact that he will look nine years older. Should he, on the general principle of doing at Rome as the Romans do, share with his vulpine companions in any feast of human flesh, a wolf he must remain to the end of his days. As very probably, however, he would find amongst his comrades some few who, like himself, were human beings undergoing this temporary metamorphosis, he would be encouraged to persevere in this restriction of his diet by their example and encouragement, and also escape the painful singularity that his genuinely wolf associates would very possibly resent. One Fabius, having an inquiring mind and fired with curiosity as to why the man should carefully suspend his clothes in an oak tree, is able to add as the result of his inquiries, that those are the clothes that the man resumes when he emerges from the lake. Whether they had been miraculously preserved or whether they had undergone such deterioration as would otherwise arise from their suspension in a tree exposed to all weathers for nine years he does not inform us. The point is a distinctly interesting one, and especially to the man reclaiming his wardrobe. One great feature of terror in the belief in lycanthropy and such like metamorphosis is that the man still retains his human reason, memory, and knowledge of himself and his surroundings, and is, in addition, imbued with the fierce animal instincts of the ravenous brute into which he has been transformed.