singing were feathered men; that the trees around the walls drew
their leaves from a like source. The statues seemed about to move,
the walls to speak, the dumb cattle to break out in prophecy; nay!
the very sky and the sunbeams, as if they might suddenly cry out."
Witches are there who can draw down the moon, or at least the lunar
virus--that white fluid she sheds, to be found, so rarely, "on high,
heathy places: which is a poison. A touch of it will drive men mad."

And in one very remote village lives the sorceress Pamphile, who
turns her neighbours into various animals. What true humour in the
scene where, after mounting the rickety stairs, Lucius, peeping
curiously through a chink in the door, is a spectator of the
transformation of the old witch herself into a bird, that she may
take flight to the object of her affections--into an owl! "First she
stripped off every rag she had. Then opening a certain chest she
took from it many small boxes, and removing the lid [59] of one of
them, rubbed herself over for a long time, from head to foot, with an
ointment it contained, and after much low muttering to her lamp,
began to jerk at last and shake her limbs. And as her limbs moved to
and fro, out burst the soft feathers: stout wings came forth to view:
the nose grew hard and hooked: her nails were crooked into claws; and
Pamphile was an owl. She uttered a queasy screech; and, leaping
little by little from the ground, making trial of herself, fled
presently, on full wing, out of doors."

By clumsy imitation of this process, Lucius, the hero of the romance,
transforms himself, not as he had intended into a showy winged
creature, but into the animal which has given name to the book; for
throughout it there runs a vein of racy, homely satire on the love of
magic then prevalent, curiosity concerning which had led Lucius to