excited in my childish mind—how many years
ago? fifty, at least—and brought back to me,
with a tumultuous rush, all the series of
circumstances that then so oppressed my life with a
vague, nameless, unspeakable horror; and when,
in later life, these circumstances were explained,
the explanation only substituted real for
imaginary terrors.

An only child, my early days were spent in
the old place that had been in our family for
upwards of three centuries. It was situated in
Cornwall, near the sea, far from any town of
the least importance, and it and our lives—my
father's and mine, for I was motherless—were
so isolated that often months, nay, I may say
years, passed, without our ever seeing a new
face.

In those days of which I speak, my father
must have been still a young and a handsome
man; but children commonly have such incorrect
ideas as to the ages and appearances of
their elders, and of their parents especially, that
the memory of my father always presents itself
as that of a middle-aged, sombre, silent, not
generally pleasing or attractive man.

I loved him less than I feared him; not that
he was ever other than gentle and most kind to
me; but somehow there was, I know not how,
an uneasy feeling subsisting between us; we
never were on the terms of fond protection on
the one side, of clinging confidence on the other,
that alone constitute the natural and healthy
relations between father and child.

What above all caused this uneasy sensation
on my part, was the consciousness—I cannot
say when it first came, but come it did, gradually
growing on me in a way whose oppression I
cannot now recal without a return of its weight
—that my father was constantly—furtively and
secretly, out constantly—watching me. Watching
me, too, with a sort of anxious, fearful
expectancy, as if there was about me something
alarming or unnatural, that should stamp me
as a creature apart from the rest of my
species.

From this thought came the yet more harassing
one that such a feeling on his part might have
a real foundation I knew not of. I can
perfectly remember secretly studying my own face
and figure in the large cheval-glass that stood
in au unused dressing-room (my mother's, as
I afterwards learnt), to discover if I had any
personal peculiarity, or sign, or deformity, that
might in any way account for this singular
demeanour of my father's, and watching my own
words, and habits, and behaviour, to test if in
them lay the cause thereof. But I could myself
discover nothing. The mirror only showed me
a pale, large-eyed, delicate-looking boy, tall and
slight beyond his years, with a particularly
grave, reflective cast of countenance (these
particulars, my recollection of my own image,
rather than my then view of it, informs
me), and loose, dark, curling hair, hanging
over the forehead, and giving additional shade
and solemnity to the eyes. And when I turned
my thoughts inwards, to study, as well as I
could, my moral characteristics, I could in them
detect no incongruities calculated to justify
uneasiness.

At last—never shall I forget the months of
watchful terror that followed that supposed
explanation of the mystery—I fancied I had found
a clue to the awful secret.

Sometimes, weary with wandering about alone,
I used to roam into the library, and, taking
down a book by chance, try to find some amusement
therein; few of the volumes were in any
way calculated to suit the taste and comprehension
of a child, being chiefly of a grave character,
but at last I hit upon a collection of old legendary
poems and ballads, and herein found ample
food for interest. Among these was the Breton
legend of Bisclavaret, the tale of the knight who,
owing to some fearful but unexplained fatality,
was compelled at certain times to assume the
shape and nature of a wolf.

Could I be a Bisclavaret? was the question
that instantly addressed itself to my mind.
Did my father know that at some time I was
destined to undergo this fearful transformation?
Was he acquainted with the indications
that announced the change? Had he yet
perceived any of them?

Such were the questions that now haunted
my waking thoughts and my nightly dreams,
and as, no doubt, these terrible anxieties
produced a visible effect on my looks and manner,
my father, full of an uneasy terror whose nature
I mistook, increased his painful surveillance, and,
by it, my racking alarms.

I saw the moment when I should myself
perceive the commencement of the transformation.
I pictured the manner of it in fifty ways. Sometimes
I fancied it would be gradual, and I should
see and feel the slow blending of the human and
bestial natures, till the former should be
swallowed up in the latter, and I should become, for
the time being, at all events, a real wolf. At
others, I fancied the change would be
instantaneous, that, from a boy, I should suddenly
spring into a raging ravening monster, fall—
who could tell?—on those around me?—my
father, my nurse, my favourite animals, pony,
dog, or bird, and then, with bloody fangs, rush
howling, an object of hatred and terror to all,
into the dark woods that extended for miles
around the house, ending, perhaps, by falling
into the black abyss of one of the worn-out mines
that were not rare in the district.

Our house, which was a very large one, had
been built and added to at different periods, and
my father and I only occupied a comparatively
small portion of one end of it. This portion
was shut out from the rest by a door at the
termination of a passage, which was kept so entirely
closed up that I had never seen it opened, and
the unused part of the house I had never once
entered. Often, with intense curiosity, I had
looked up at the shuttered windows, wondering
what manner of rooms they were that daylight
never visited, longing, yet half dreading, to
explore them. Another object of curious and
unsatisfied interest to me was a walled enclosure