Title:  Lady Into Fox

Author:  David Garnett

Release Date:  November 29, 2003 [eBook #10337] [Date last updated:  January 8, 2005]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  Us-ASCII

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LADY INTO FOX

By

DAVID GARNETT

ILLUSTRATED WITH WOOD ENGRAVINGS

BY R. A. GARNETT

1922

TO

DUNCAN GRANT

[Illustration:  Mr. And Mrs. Tebrick at home]

Wonderful or supernatural events are not so uncommon, rather they are irregular in their incidence.  Thus there may be not one marvel to speak of in a century, and then often enough comes a plentiful crop of them; monsters of all sorts swarm suddenly upon the earth, comets blaze in the sky, eclipses frighten nature, meteors fall in rain, while mermaids and sirens beguile, and sea-serpents engulf every passing ship, and terrible cataclysms beset humanity.

But the strange event which I shall here relate came alone, unsupported, without companions into a hostile world, and for that very reason claimed little of the general attention of mankind.  For the sudden changing of Mrs. Tebrick into a vixen is an established fact which we may attempt to account for as we will.  Certainly it is in the explanation of the fact, and the reconciling of it with our general notions that we shall find most difficulty, and not in accepting for true a story which is so fully proved, and that not by one witness but by a dozen, all respectable, and with no possibility of collusion between them.

But here I will confine myself to an exact narrative of the event and all that followed on it.  Yet I would not dissuade any of my readers from attempting an explanation of this seeming miracle because up till now none has been found which is entirely satisfactory.  What adds to the difficulty to my mind is that the metamorphosis occurred when Mrs. Tebrick was a full-grown woman, and that it happened suddenly in so short a space of time.  The sprouting of a tail, the gradual extension of hair all over the body, the slow change of the whole anatomy by a process of growth, though it would have been monstrous, would not have been so difficult to reconcile to our ordinary conceptions, particularly had it happened in a young child.