E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell,
Project Gutenberg Beginners Projects, Mary Ann Fink,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
LADY INTO FOX
LADY INTO FOX
"Mr. and Mrs. Tebrick at Home"
Wonderful or supernatural events are not so uncommon, ratherthey are irregular in their incidence. Thus there may be not onemarvel to speak of in a century, and then often enough comes aplentiful crop of them; monsters of all sorts swarm suddenly uponthe earth, comets blaze in the sky, eclipses frighten nature,meteors fall in rain, while mermaids and sirens beguile, andsea-serpents engulf every passing ship, and terrible cataclysmsbeset humanity.
But the strange event which I shall here relate came alone,unsupported, without companions into a hostile world, and for thatvery reason claimed little of the general attention of mankind. Forthe sudden changing of Mrs. Tebrick into a vixen is an establishedfact which we may attempt to account for as we will. Certainly itis in the explanation of the fact, and the reconciling of it withour general notions that we shall find most difficulty, and not inaccepting for true a story which is so fully proved, and that notby one witness but by a dozen, all respectable, and with nopossibility of collusion between them.
But here I will confine myself to an exact narrative of theevent and all that followed on it. Yet I would not dissuade any ofmy readers from attempting an explanation of this seeming miraclebecause up till now none has been found which is entirelysatisfactory. What adds to the difficulty to my mind is that themetamorphosis occurred when Mrs. Tebrick was a full-grown woman,and that it happened suddenly in so short a space of time. Thesprouting of a tail, the gradual extension of hair all over thebody, the slow change of the whole anatomy by a process of growth,though it would have been monstrous, would not have been sodifficult to reconcile to our ordinary conceptions, particularlyhad it happened in a young child.
But here we have something very different. A grown lady ischanged straightway into a fox. There is no explaining that away byany natural philosophy. The materialism of our age will not help ushere. It is indeed a miracle; something from outside ourworld altogether; an event which we would willingly accept if wewere to meet it invested with the authority of Divine Revelation inthe scriptures, but which we are not prepared to encounter almostin our time, happening in Oxfordshire amongst our neighbours.
The only things which go any way towards an explana