try, promising to return on a visit (according to the custom of Indian women, who, like their white sisters, are fain to display their offspring). This obligation, however, she neglects; but the time arrives when her human husband finds his bright bride altogether too warm for comfortable cohabitation, and vanishes without permission. Thus deserted, the wife, whose second son has just been born, sets out for her father's house, taking her first child, and also her babe in arms. "Her father saw her coming, and said to himself: 'She disobeyed my commands. Why ought I to receive her now, when she would not come before? She shall never find me, nor enter my house.' Therefore, when she was nearing Lytton, he turned her into the sun which we now see. This is the reason that the sun travels each day from east to west in search of her father."
A very pretty story (No. X.) illustrates the originally inimical character of natural forces. The hot and cold winds are engaged in internecine strife; the Indians, who have to bear the brunt of the quarrel, use their best efforts to act as intercessors and negotiate a peace. By such mediation, it is finally arranged that the feud shall be concluded by a marriage; a child of the south wind is sent to the icy north, where in time she becomes acclimated. According to custom, she desires to return with her babe, and her southern brother meets her to act as escort. But the air which breathes about the infant is so frigid that the unaccustomed southerner can endure it no longer; in his disgust, he snatches the babe from its mother and flings it into the lake. Forthwith the air grows mild, and the infant floats as a lump of ice; the proof may be seen on the lake, any spring, when warm airs breathe. The alliance, however, has performed its function; the union has tempered the breezes, and the gain belongs to mankind; only now and then do the blasts still rage in their unregenerate force.
The obvious poetry of these narratives needs not to be pointed out. It is to be observed, however, that this essentially poetic character is disguised by the baldness of the style in which the ideas are enveloped, a characteristic common to early epic narrative, and which is apt to mislead the modern reader, who is accustomed to conscious ornamentation, and finds it hard to perceive unadorned beauty. Moreover, primitive stories are filled with accounts of cruelty, licentiousness, and incest, actions which in higher ethical conditions would be regarded as inexcusable crimes, but which in savage morals fail to awaken the same horror. Present also are disgusting elements, which yet have their instructive side; in the present collection appears evidence that practices maintained in the theory of modern witchcraft, and which might be explained as an interpolation caused by the tendency to accentuate a conscious reverse to accepted
