a stone until the Judgment Day, and that in the mean time his own hut by the kiln is empty, and he needs a wife.
But superstition, it is claimed, begets cruelty, and cruelty is a vice now most rigorously frowned down by polite society. Daring spirits, like Mr. Besant, may still urge its claims upon our reluctant consideration; Mr. Andrew Lang may pronounce it an essential element of humor; or a purely speculative genius, like Mr. Pater, may venture to show how adroitly it can be used as a help to religious sentiment; but every age has pet vices of its own, and, being singularly intolerant of those it has discarded, is not inclined to listen to any arguments in their favor. Superstition burned old women for witches, dotards for warlocks, and idiots for were-wolves; but in its gentler aspect it often threw a veil of charity over both man and beast. The Greek rustic, who found a water-newt wriggling in his gourd, tossed the little creature back into the stream, remembering that it was the unfortunate Ascalaphus, whom the wrath of Demeter had consigned to this loathsome doom. The mediæval housewife, when startled by a gaunt wolf
