He had his humorous touches also.

And what went to the ordinary boyish taste, in those somewhat peculiar readers, what would have charmed boys more purely boyish, was the adventure:--the bear loose in the house at night, the wolves storming the farms in winter, the exploits of the robbers, their charming caves, the delightful thrill one had at the question--"Don't you know that these roads are infested by robbers ?" The scene of the romance was laid in Thessaly, the original land of witchcraft, and took one up and down its mountains, and into its old weird towns, haunts of magic and [58] incantation, where all the more genuine appliances of the black art, left behind her by Medea when she fled through that country, were still in use.

In the city of Hypata, indeed, nothing seemed to be its true self--"You might think that through the murmuring of some cadaverous spell, all things had been changed into forms not their own; that there was humanity in the hardness of the stones you stumbled on; that the birds you heard 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.