Page:The Book of the Damned (Fort, 1919).djvu/299

 CHAPTER XXVIII OTES and Queries, 7-8-508:

A correspondent who had been to Devonshire writes for information as to a story that he had heard there: of an occurrence of about thirty-five years before the date of writing:

Of snow upon the ground—of all South Devonshire waking up one morning to find such tracks in the snow as had never before been heard of—"clawed footmarks" or "an unclassifiable form"—alternating at huge but regular intervals with what seemed to be the impression of the point of a stick—but the scattering of the prints—amazing expanse of territory covered—obstacles, such as hedges, walls, houses, seemingly surmounted

Intense excitement—that the track had been followed by huntsmen and hounds, until they had come to a forest—from which the hounds had retreated, baying and terrified, so that no one had dared to enter the forest.

Notes and Queries, 7-9-18:

Whole occurrence well-remembered by a correspondent: a badger had left marks in the snow: this was determined, and the excitement had "dropped to a dead calm in a single day."

Notes and Queries, 7-9-70:

That for years a correspondent had had a tracing of the prints, which his mother had taken from those in the snow in her garden, in Exmouth: that they were hoof-like marks—but had been made by a biped.

Notes and Queries, 7-9-253:

Well remembered by another correspondent, who writes of the excitement and consternation of "some classes." He says that a kangaroo had escaped from a menagerie—"the footprints being so peculiar and far apart gave rise to a scare that the devil was loose."

We have had a story, and now we shall tell it over from contemporaneous sources. We have had the later accounts first very largely for an impression of the correlating effect that time brings 293