SALAMANDERS. 359 



what we may call its highest development in countries the 

 people of which acknowledge the orthodox Greek church. 

 Eastern European vampires have always been more fierce, 

 more murderously inclined, than corresponding beings of the 

 west. Climate may have something to do with this; and 

 perhaps temperament. Greek brigands are more terrible than 

 others, why not Greek vampires I 



Even on matters most apparently transcendental, one can 

 draw practical deductions. No harm can ever come of making 

 security doubly sure. I am led to infer, then, that if a dead 

 body, after a reasonable time of burial has elapsed, be still 

 found soft and pliable; if it bleeds on puncture, and shows 

 no sign of fulfilling the decree of dust to dusty there is room 

 for the worst suspicions. 



In such a case the unquiet and evil-disposed corpse can be 

 laid by adopting one of two expedients. The first is, to cause 

 the grave to be beaten with a hazel twig, the operator being 

 a virgin of not less than twenty-five years old. The second 

 expedient consists in digging the body up and burning it. 

 My authorities leave me no room to doubt that the first and 

 much simpler remedy is not equally effectual with the second; 

 nevertheless, for some inexplicable reason, the remedy of in- 

 cremation is always practised, in lands where vampires do 

 most abound. 



SALAMANDERS. 



PERHAPS the basilisk, whose mystery I unveiled, is not 

 so familiar in name to English people of to-day as the sala- 

 mander. A certain wide-spread popular belief attributes to 

 long-continued flame the power of generating a dragon-like 

 monster him of whom I write. Thus it was long a habit 

 with glass-workers to extinguish their furnaces once in seven 

 years, to avoid, as they believed, the generation of a sala- 

 mander ; and in the mining part of Cornwall, where ( fire- 



