“Sucking his drink?”

“Yes.”

“‘Not to suck your drink; that is the Law.’ Much the brutes care for the Law, eh? when Moreau’s not about!”

“It was the brute who chased me.”

“Of course,” said Montgomery; “it’s just the way with carnivores. After a kill, they drink. It’s the taste of blood, you know. — What was the brute like?” he continued. “Would you know him again?” He glanced about us, standing astride over the mess of dead rabbit, his eyes roving among the shadows and screens of greenery, the lurking-places and ambuscades of the forest that bounded us in. “The taste of blood,” he said again.

He took out his revolver, examined the cartridges in it and replaced it. Then he began to pull at his dropping lip.

“I think I should know the brute again,” I said. “I stunned him. He ought to have a handsome bruise on the forehead of him.”

“But then we have to prove that he killed the rabbit,” said Montgomery. “I wish I’d never brought the things here.”

I should have gone on, but he stayed there thinking over the mangled rabbit in a puzzle-headed way. As it was, I went to such a distance that the rabbit’s remains were hidden.

“Come on!” I said.

Presently he woke up and came towards me. me “You see,” he said, almost in a whisper, “they are all supposed to have a fixed idea against eating anything that runs on land. If some brute has by any accident tasted blood He went on some way in silence. “I wonder what can have happened,” he said to himself. Then, after a pause again: “I did a foolish thing the other day. That servant of mine — I showed him how to skin and cook a rabbit. It’s odd — I saw him licking his hands — It never occurred to me.” Then: “We must put a stop to this. I must tell Moreau.”

He could think of nothing else on our homeward journey.

Moreau took the matter even more seriously than Montgomery, and I need scarcely say that I was affected by their evident consternation.

“We must make an example,” said Moreau. “I’ve no doubt in my own mind that the Leopard-man was the sinner. But how can we prove it? I wish, Montgomery, you had kept your taste for meat in hand, and gone without these exciting novelties. We may find ourselves in a mess yet, through it.”

“I was a silly ass,” said Montgomery. “But the thing’s done now; and you said I might have them, you know.”

“We must see to the thing at once,” said Moreau. “I suppose if anything should turn up, M’ling can take care of himself?”

“I’m not so sure of M’ling,” said Montgomery. “I think I ought to know him.”

In the afternoon, Moreau, Montgomery, myself, and M’ling went across the island to the huts in the ravine. We three were armed; M’ling carried the little hatchet he used in chopping firewood, and some coils of wire. Moreau had a huge cowherd’s horn slung over his shoulder.

I was so far in my reflections when, as I have said, a side-light began to shine upon the subject from the laboratory table. I began to perceive more deeply than it has ever yet been stated, the trembling immateriality, the mist-like transience of this seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired. Certain agents I found to have the power to shake and to pluck back that fleshly vestment, even as a wind might toss the curtains of a pavilion. For two good reasons, I will not enter deeply into this scientific branch of my confession. First, because I have been made to learn that the doom and burthen of our life is bound for ever on man’s shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure. Second, because, as my narrative will make, alas! too evident, my discoveries were incomplete. Enough, then, that I not only recognised my natural body for the mere aura and effulgence of certain of the powers that made up my spirit, but managed to compound a drug by which these powers should be dethroned from their supremacy, and a second form and countenance substituted, none the less natural to me because they were the expression, and bore the stamp, of lower elements in my soul.

I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of practice. I knew well that I risked death; for any drug that so potently controlled and shook the very fortress of identity, might by the least scruple of an overdose or at the least inopportunity in the moment of exhibition, utterly blot out that immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it to change. But the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound, at last overcame the suggestions of alarm. I had long since prepared my tincture; I purchased at once, from a firm of wholesale chemists, a large quantity of a particular salt which I knew, from my experiments, to be the last ingredient required; and late one accursed night, I compounded the elements, watched them boil and smoke together in the glass, and when the ebullition had subsided, with a strong glow of courage, drank off the potion.

The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill-race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. I stretched out my hands, exulting in the freshness of these sensations; and in the act, I was suddenly aware that I had lost in stature.