court of law pronounced the belief in were-wolves to be an insane delusion, and from that date it slowly declined. Heretics were suspected of being were-wolves. As late as fifty years ago, a reminiscence of the _loup garou_ existed in most parts of France, in the shape of the _meneux des loups_, who were supposed to charm or tame whole packs of wolves which they led across the waste lands on nights when the moon shone fitfully through rifts in hurrying clouds. The village recluse, the poacher, the man who simply “knew more than he should,” fell under the suspicion of being a “wolf-leader,” and, of course, the usual “eye-witness” was forthcoming to declare that he had _seen_ the suspected individual out upon his midnight rambles with his wolves trotting after him. In some provinces all the fiddlers or bag-pipers were thought to be “wolf-leaders.” [Illustration: _Maurice Sand._ “LE MENEUR DES LOUPS.”] If the wolf turnskin died out sooner in England than in France, it was because there were no wolves to fasten it upon. Throughout the horrible witch-mania British sorcerers were supposed to turn into cats, weasels, or innocent hares! Italian witches still turn into cats. I remember how graphically C. G. Leland described to me a visit he had paid to a Tuscan witch; her cottage contained three stools, on one of which sat the witch, on the second her familiar jet-black cat, and on the third my old friend, who, I feel sure, had come to believe a good deal in the “old religion,” and who, in his last years, might have sat for a perfect portrait of a magician! The connexion of the witch and the cat is a form of turnskin-belief in which the feature of the acquirement of second sight is prominent. No witch without a cat! The essential _fact_ in the superstition is the fondness of poor, old friendless women for cats—their last friends. A contributing fact lay in the mysterious disappearances and reappearances of cats and in their half-wild nature. The cat in Indian folk-lore is the tiger’s aunt.