THE WERE-TIGER
Soul that is dead ere life be sped,
Body that's body of Beast,
With brain of a man to dare and to plan,
So make I ready my Feast!With tooth and claw and grip of jaw
I rip and tear and slay,
With senses that hear the winds ere they stir,
I roam to the dawn of day.Soul that must languish in endless anguish,
Thy life is a little spell,
So take thy fill, ere the Pow'rs of Ill
Shall drag Thee, Soul, to Hell.The Song of the Loup Garou.If you ask that excellent body of savants the Society for Psychical Research, for
an opinion on the subject, they will tell you that the belief in ghosts, magic,
witchcraft, and the like having existed in all ages, and in every land, is in itself a
fact sufficient to warrant a faith in these things, and to establish a strong
probability of their reality. It is not for me, or such as I am, to question the
opinion of these wise men of the West, but if ghosts, and phantoms, and
witchcraft and hag-ridings are to be accepted on such grounds, I must be allowed
to put in a plea, for similar reasons, in favour of the Loup Garou, the Were-
Tiger, and all their gruesome family. Wherever there are wild beasts to prey
upon the sons of men, there also is found the belief that the worst and most
rapacious of the man-eaters are themselves human beings, who have been driven
to temporarily assume the form of an animal, by the aid of the Black Art, in
order to satisfy their overpowering lust for blood. This belief, which seeks to
account for the extraordinary rapacity of an animal by tracing its origin to a