In the Middle Ages the wolf seems to have been in decidedly bad odour; he was probably too well-known to be respected, and in the long dreary nights of winter proved himself a terribly bad neighbour, and a very undesirable travelling companion for those who had to cross amidst the snows the almost trackless wastes. Amongst the Scandinavians the wolf held a conspicuous place in tradition and mythology. Eclipses of the sun and moon were held to be caused by two great wolves that were always pursuing them through the heavens.[52] The wolf, too, was the companion of Odin, the god of war, and at his feet these creatures crouched while he fed them with the flesh of his enemies. It was an accepted belief that if a man encountered a wolf, and the creature caught sight of him before he saw it, he became dumb. Scott refers to this old notion in his “Quentin Durward,” where, in the eighteenth chapter, Lady Hameline exclaims, “Our young companion has seen a wolf, and has lost his tongue in consequence.” “The ground or occasionall originall thereof,” Browne in his “Exposure of Vulgar Errors” would endeavour to persuade us, “was probably the amazement and sudden silence the unexpected appearance of wolves doe often put upon travellers, not by a supposed vapour or venomous emanation, but a vehement fear which naturally produceth obmutescence, and sometimes irrecoverable silence”; but it would appear to be a still simpler procedure, and one with a good deal to recommend it, to deny that there is an atom of truth in the story. In another old natural history before us, we read that “the wolf when he falls upon a hog or a goat, or such small beast, does not immediately kill them, but leads them by the ear, with all the speed he can, to a crew of ravenous wolves, who instantly tear them to pieces.” We should have thought that the reverse had been more probable, and that the wolves that had nothing would have come with all the speed they could upon their more successful comrade; but if the old writer’s story be true, it opens out a fine trait of hitherto unsuspected unselfishness in the character of the wolf. John Leo, in his “History of Africa,” declares that the dragon is the progeny of the eagle and wolf. Perhaps this may be so, but probably the conception that most of our readers have of the dragon is that he was a considerably more formidable beast than such a parentage, fierce as it is, quite suggests.