Myths and Legends Beyond Our Borders E-Book

Charles M. Skinner

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 381

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

The kind reception of Mr. Skinner's first volume has encouraged him to go beyond the territory of the United States for material for a fresh collection ; and this material he now embodies in a small-sized but rather closely printed book of " Myths and Legends Beyond Our Borders". About two-thirds of the collection are drawn from Canada, and the remainder from Mexico. There is much curious and suggestive matter in the volume, and it should not be neglected by students of folk-lore. From the contents: Canada Explorers And Aborigines Myths Of Creation, Heaven, And Hell Glooskap At Menagwes The Dogs Of Clote Scaurp The Missions A Few Monsters Some Names Troubles On The St. Lawrence American Elephants Hidden Gold How One Bear Lost His Life The Isle Of Demons The Figure In Smoky Hut The Shadow Of Holland Cove The Friar Of Campobello Two Melicite Victories The Flame Sloop Of Caraquette The Acadians And Evangeline The Tolling Off Gaspe The Ride To Death The General With An Ear The Defence Of St. John Brother And Sister In Battle The Golden Dog The Grave In The Cellar The Mountain And The See The Sin Of Father St.

Leseprobe

Myths and Legends Beyond Our Borders

Charles M. Skinner

Contents:

Canada

Explorers And Aborigines

Myths Of Creation, Heaven, And Hell

Glooskap At Menagwes

The Dogs Of Clote Scaurp

The Missions

A Few Monsters

Some Names

Troubles On The St. Lawrence

American Elephants

Hidden Gold

How One Bear Lost His Life

The Isle Of Demons

The Figure In Smoky Hut

The Shadow Of Holland Cove

The Friar Of Campobello

Two Melicite Victories

The Flame Sloop Of Caraquette

The Acadians And Evangeline

The Tolling Off Gaspe

The Ride To Death

The General With An Ear

The Defence Of St. John

Brother And Sister In Battle

The Golden Dog

The Grave In The Cellar

The Mountain And The See

The Sin Of Father St. Bernard

Larouche Had His Wish

The Heart Of Frontenac

The Devil Dance On Orleans

The Defiance At Elora

The Miracles Of Sainte Anne

Tadousac Bell At Midnight

The Bell Of Caughnawaga

The Massacre At Bic

The Doom Of Mamelons

The Revenge Of Hudson

Kenen's Sacrifice

The Calling Of Zoe De Mersac

The Headless Deserters

The Devil's Head

Father Jacques's Vengeance

The Bonnechere Affair

He Went Back For His Gun

Kwasind, The Strong

The Curse Of Success

The Death Of Wahwun

The Devil's Half-Acre

Medicine Hat

Ghost Woman At The Blood Camp

The Blackfoot Eden

The Wicked Wife

Fourth Of July At Yale

Death Of The Great Beaver

Why The Mountains Were Made

The Place Of Dead Men

How The Indians Became Red

The Pool Of Destruction

Yehl, The Light-Maker

The Shelter Of Edgecumbe

How Selfishness Was Punished

The Ghost Of Sitka Castle

A Fatal Rivalry

Bad Boys Of Na-As River

The Baffled Ice God

Mexico

White Visitors Before Columbus

The White God

Spiritual Guidance

Eagle, Snake, And Cactus

Told In Yucatan

Our Lady Of Guadalupe

Our Lady Of The Remedies

Some Other Miracles

The Picture And The Storm

The Mischievous Cocktail

The Councillors Of Lagos

The Humpback Of Colima

Why Cholula Pyramid Was Built

The Ark On Colhuacan

Making The Sun

The Popul Vuh

Fathers Of The Miztecs

The Willing Captive

The Death-Dance Of Tezcatlipoca

Other Wiles Of The Evil God

The Aztec Tannhauser

Huitzilopochtli

The War-God Takes A Bride

El Dorado

The Dwarf's House

Why Valdez Bought Prayers

Father Jose's Love

The Devil In Prison

The Alligator-Tree

Evil Spirits In The Springs

Devils And Doubloons

Incidents Of War

Gambling Away The Sun

Huascar's Prophecy

The Medal And The Orchid

The Honest Muleteers

Aiguerre's Fire

The Amazons

Bolivar At Caracas

Myths and Legends Beyond Our Borders, Charles M. Skinner

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Germany

ISBN: 9783849619893

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

Canada

EXPLORERS AND ABORIGINES

CANADA, from its earliest settlement, has been to most white Americans a dark, cool land of mystery. Only since its railroads joined East and West together, since the frontier settlements of the last generation developed into cities, since the farming districts of the prairie began to draw their hardy populace from older lands, has it become known to our southern millions that it is a country differing in little from their own, the same in speech and spirit, akin in laws and faith and manners. The history of the republic and that of the colony were the same down to the time of the Revolution, yet Canada's northern position, its settlement by the French, the individuality of its native tribes, its exploration by missionaries, its imagined remoteness, gave rise to tales that, while not verified, had reason for being. The history of the province is full of romance. The legends that have grown from it compel the attention no more than the tales of conquest, diplomacy, daring, and difficulty, and those new reports of wealth on the Yukon. Many of the unwritten tales run counter to record, others so merge in it that it is impossible to separate them, but, as they have character, romance, humor, or quaintness, they deserve to be saved from the assaults of commercialism and commonplace.

Long before the time of Cabot, Cartier, Roberval, Champlain, and Hudson, Canada was known, in Norse tradition, and it is claimed that Basque and Breton fishermen caught cod on the Grand Banks a century before Columbus's day. Canada was the first part of America to be discovered, and Bjarne Herjulfsson, son of an Icelander who had moved to Greenland, reached Cape Breton in the year 986, while trying to join his father in his new home. Fourteen years later Leif Ericsson, son of the Icelandic jarl, Eric the Red, tried to find this new land. It is not known exactly where he went ashore, but Labrador was first sighted: Helluland, he called it; " a country of no advantages." Next he passed Markland, with its flat beaches and its woods: Nova Scotia? And Vinland, which is any place you please, was last explored. Somewhere, possibly on the Penobscot, was the city of crystal and silver, Norumbega, Norombega, Norumbeque, and maybe Aranbega, Arambek, and Lorembek. Newfoundland, oldest of the British colonies, was one of the first regions that seemed to promise wealth, for it did not take the explorers long to find that its waters swarmed with fish. Indeed, the Portuguese name of Bacalhaos, long borne by Newfoundland, means codfish. Nor was Labrador without its promise in the eyes of those same Portuguese, for the name, which is in their tongue, means laborer. (It is not Le Bras d'Or, the arm of gold, for Cape Breton has its Bras d'Or.) " King Emanuel, having heard of the high trees growing in the northern countries, and having seen the aborigines, who appeared so well qualified for labor, thought he had found a new slave-coast like that which he owned in Africa, and dreamed of the tall masts he would cut and the men-of-war he would build from the forests." Mistaken man! The power of the Latin races in North America was brief, and it left few marks in comparison with that of the Anglo Saxons who so soon possessed the land and who almost alone have made it what it is. Though racked by frequent wars in those dark times, the country advanced a little after every struggle, and the builders of air-castles, the founders of visionary empires, were jostled aside if they loitered in the way of progress.

The Indians themselves throw little light on their own history, and if facts were originally embodied in their fantastic myths, the forms of these parables have in almost every case concealed the meanings. That in the days of unwritten history there were great political and military movements there is no doubt, — movements that to the red dwellers in this land were as momentous as the wars and changes in Europe were to the Greeks and Romans. We have reason to believe that men existed here long before the last of the North American glaciers, and that they were driven toward the warm belt by its advance; that there are relations between the Alaskans and the Aztecs; that the Canadian Indians drove the mound-builders southward six hundred years ago. The " great horned snake" of Ontario, against which they battled, may have been the snake-shaped forts of these mound-makers, like those remaining in the Ohio Valley. Their man-god, Michabo, or Hiawatha, " drives the serpents to the south." On Moose Mountain, Assiniboia, are cairns with lines of stones radiating from them, the early work of mound-builders, or imitations of it by their conquerors, who relate that the stones were placed there by the spirit of the winds.

Various theories as to the origin of the Indians account for them (1) as autochthonous, or self-created: a legitimate theory, since the geologic age of this country qualifies it to have been not merely the original land of the Indians, but the cradle of the human race; (2) as members of the lost tribes of Israel; (3) as survivors of the sunken continent of Atlantis; (4) as Phoenicians; (5) as Carthaginians; (6) as Greeks; (7) as Chinese, who reached these shores in 458 a.d.; and (8) as Mongols, who arrived in the thirteenth century. The latter theory, which would have assumed the peopling of a vast continent in a couple of hundred years, is of course absurd, but an identity of certain Canadian and certain Asiatic tribes is at least suggested by likeness in their beliefs and customs, such as their tribal work and government, traditions, religious faiths, superstitions, way of regarding women, treatment of guests, sacrifices, burials, funerals, the wearing of feathers, use of bark utensils, form of weapons, dog feasts, games, emblems, pipe-smoking, serpent-worship, serpent-charming, sacred animals, dances, figures of oratory, and monosyllabic speech. In their free, sane life the physical adequacy of the Indians should have been maintained, and there is no reason to suppose that as a family they have deteriorated, in spite of the allegation that in the Ontario government park, at Rondeau, Lake Erie, the skeletons of wellproportioned men seven and one-half feet high have been unearthed. The later history of the red race is too familiar to recount, and it is most sad. When some royal commissioners in eastern Canada had the audacity to ask a native chief what claim his people had to the country, he replied only, " There lie our grandfathers; there lie our fathers; there lie our children." To the first settlers the idea that the savage could be a creature of sentiment was preposterous, and that he should wish to hold his ancestral woods and fields no less so. Bitter has been the strife that has driven him from his old estate. He is an outcast in his own land, a victim of wrongs uncounted and cruelties as dire as those with which he has retaliated on the aggressors.

But he is not what so many have painted him. In many of his traditions it will be seen that he has a moral sense as keen as any one's, and courage to live to it; that he is a man.

MYTHS OF CREATION, HEAVEN, AND HELL

BELIEFS touching death, the spirit-world, and the hereafter vary with the different tribes of Canada, and some of them have undergone change from contact with missionaries. Often the merging-point of the old and the new belief is impossible to descry, while in the case of the teacher who came across the Pacific in a copper canoe, preached morality to the shore tribes, was crucified, arose, resumed preaching, and was afterward obeyed, we find a blending of the Christ history and the Hiawatha legend.

The Nootkas in their version of this tale do not include either crucifixion or resurrection. On the contrary, they assume that the killing of the teacher was a good thing, because they secured his copper canoe and paddles, and the use of copper they learned at that time. Some of the great wooden images in their houses represent this teacher who promised a future life. Sheets of copper with eyes painted on them have been seen at Fort Rupert, and are thought to symbolize the sun. They are regarded with peculiar reverence.

In a Chippewayan legend the first country was that through which the Copper-Mine River flows, and the ground was strewn with copper. A bird created this country, — a vast bird whose glance was lightning, and thunder the shaking of his wings. He created the earth by touching the primal ocean. The first men wore out their feet with walking and their throats with eating.

Some pretty traditions have grown from the implanting of a new faith in imaginative soil. The loose quartz crystals found near Quebec are said to be Christ's tears, wept upon the earth for the sins of its people. The northern lights, which among ungospelled tribes are the spirits of dead friends dancing, the brighter the merrier, have turned to angels, throwing down snow to cool the parched in hell. An Indian who was discovered on all fours in a wood near Wardsville, moving softly over the snow, was at first suspected of mischief; but he was only waiting to see the deer fall on their knees before the Great Spirit, as he had heard they did on Christmas night.

Biblical teaching and native myth are queerly mixed in the Ojibway tale of the beginning of the race, which they say occurred at Torch Lake, or Lac du Flambeau. The Great Spirit had made the vegetation about this water, and was surprised when he saw a creature wallowing through the reeds in the form since taken by men, but covered with shining scales like a fish. This object went mooning about in such a mournful fashion that the Manitou, taking pity on him, made a woman, also covered with scales, and breathed life into her. He told her to wander by the shore, and presently she would find something she would be sure to like. The man found her while she slept, and, rousing her, took her to walk, showing where roots and herbs grew that were good for food. Her name, she told him, was Mani (Mary?). He took her to his spacious lodge and went with her through his garden, warning her not to eat fruit from a certain tree that grew there. When she was alone, a handsome young Indian emerged mysteriously from the tree and urged her to pick and eat the fruit, adding that it made fine preserves. She ate, and persuaded her husband to do the same. The scales fell from their bodies, and they drew back among the bushes in shame. Then Gitche Manitou drove them away, so that they could no longer eat fruits, but had to live on meat. In his wandering the first man found a great book that began speaking to him. It told him to do so many things that he could not remember half of them, and he threw it away, whereupon he found on the earth a book in sign language that covered only two squares of bark. This sign-book gave no laws, but told much about foods and remedies, so that in a few years his children became not only hunters but medicine-men. Manitou repented his anger and restored the people to his love again, ordering his own son, or agent, Manibozho, to make a paradise for them in the west, where the world ended. It is a beautiful country, and there, when they die, they battle and hunt no more, but live on sweet, shining mushrooms, play on the flute and drum, and dance all day. To reach this land they travel the Milky Way, the path of souls. They need bows or guns on the journey, but none after they reach paradise. If on the way they stop to eat a strawberry that a tempter offers to them, they fall from the bright bridge and become frogs as they touch the earth.

Among the Blackfeet the sand-hills of the plains, near the United States boundary, were the shadowland, the ghost-place, the limbo of recently departed souls. Our shadows are held to be actual souls. Dead persons sometimes live again as animals, and owls are the ghosts of medicine-men. In the Red River country the dead hover about in the form of eagles, but some of the Siwash believe they take the forms of birds more foul of habit, that lurk over the place of their demise for four days. In order to keep them at a distance the survivors burn old moccasins that make a fetid smoke. Some of the far northwestern Indians believed that hell was in the ice, for it is natural that the cold of the Arctic winter should, to them, stand for the extremest suffering, but some of the Eskimos put the place of future punishment beneath the sea, and heaven above, with plenty of walrus. Their hell is like Dante's: of successive cellars, and the deeper go the damned the colder it grows. The wickedest go to the bottom. The Eskimos, by the way, are advanced beyond certain primitive beliefs, and the new woman is no stranger to them. The Sun was a youth to whom the Great Spirit gave wings that he might chase the Moon, — a winged girl. Aoguta and her daughter Sedna are among their chief deities. The Hudson Bay Eskimos tell us that the first man sprang to being in a beautiful valley, and married the only girl on earth, after he had picked her as a flower. They were the parents of all mankind. The Assiniboins believed that hell was in the Great Selkirk glacier. The unspeakable majesty of this ice mass and its mountain setting to them was merely dreadful. The Chippewas held that the wicked were immersed to their chins in water, and that they could not leave it, although, to add to their discomfiture, the happy hunting-grounds were in their view.

Like the Greeks, many of the Indians peopled the woods, hills, and waters with gods and spirits, who were amiable or devilish according to their environment and according to the nature of the imagination that evoked them. They personified many of the stars and mountains; a comet was a winged creature breathing fire; the morning star was the Early Riser; the Dipper was the Seven Persons; the moon was the Night Red Light; the Milky Way was the Wolf Road. Spirits of places sometimes spoke to those who asked advice of them, and while La Salle's boat, the Griffin, was in process of building at Cayuga Creek, he went to Niagara to consult the oracle at Devil's Hole. A voice spoke from it warning him to abandon his voyage on pain of death by treachery. He met that fate. The Nipissings were stigmatized by the Jesuits as " the sorcerers," and Lake Nipissing was beset by devils and magicians.

The mountain in British Columbia, or Washington, on which life was preserved during the great flood is impossible of identification, but deluge legends pertain to several of the peaks. The Takullies say that the earth-builder was a muskrat, which, diving here and there in the universal ocean, brought up mud, and spat it out in one place until an island was formed, which grew to be the earth. After it had been peopled a lire swept over it, destroying all the surface save one mountain that held a deep cave, and in this hid one man and one woman until the earth was cool again, when they emerged and re-peopled it. This myth is oddly repeated in Paraguay and Bolivia. Alaskan Kaiganees say that the big canoe in which a good man was saved in the time of a great flood rested on a mountain just back of Howkan, and one old fellow claimed, a dozen or two of years ago, that he had a piece of its bark anchor-rope. The crow that flew out of the ark still nests in the crater of Mount Edgecumbe, near Sitka, and catches whales. On Forester Island they say that towns were destroyed by pest and fire for their wickedness, and that a woman who looked back in the act of flight was turned to stone, her lodge and that of her brother being also changed to rock at the same moment, and you see them in the river to-day, — warnings to obey the Great Spirit when he speaks. A legend of a collision of the earth with a fiery dragon (a comet?) is found among many of the Algonquins.

Among the Dog-Rib Indians of the Barren Grounds there is a belief in one Chapawee, a mischief-maker who plunged the earth into a long period of darkness by catching the sun in a noose and tying it fast, so that it could not rise above the horizon. Does this typify the Arctic winter? After a time he sent animals to gnaw the snare asunder, and they were burned to ashes. Does this clothe in parable the outbreak of a volcano, or the dissipation of the ice in the Arctic summer? Belike it is neither, for many of the traditions are but old wives' tales, without a meaning. Men, measurably civilized, lived in North America twenty thousand years ago; and some of the myths like the foregoing are thought to preserve the memory of the last great glacier, that covered the continent down to the fortieth parallel, burying beneath it the cities of this ancient people.

One of the traditionary characters among the western tribes, from the Blackfeet to the Aleuts of Alaska, was Old Man. He varies in power and importance in different parts of the country, but among the Aleuts he has many of the attributes of the Great Spirit, and is a secondary god. He played a Cadmus part, dropping stones on the earth, that presently sprang up in human form. Some that he flung into the air became birds, those that he cast to a distance were quadrupeds and serpents, and those that he tossed into the sea turned to fish. Thus was the world peopled. The Blackfeet say that Old Man acquired a wife, a daughter, and a son-in-law. The latter was not worth much. There arrived in the lodge a young man who had sprung from the blood of some game they were preparing for the pot, and this young one and Old Man attempted to stop the thieving and abuse of the son-in-law. They could not, and as this objectionable person had an especially violent tantrum on a certain occasion, the good ones shot him dead, and there were peace and plenty afterward. All of which has been construed as a day and night myth, a summer and winter myth, a sunshine and storm myth, a famine and plenty myth. Maybe. While some ethnologists claim that the Micmacs are the Skraelings of the Northmen, the first known explorers of our eastern coast, others relate the western tribes to the Asiatics. There are Greek words in Central American tongues, likenesses to Greek, Indian, Assyrian, and Egyptian architecture in Mexico, Central America, and Peru, pictures there of animals more common to Asia than to this continent, round towers in the West like those of Ireland, and faiths and myths among the aborigines resembling those of the Old World.

The proud Abenakis, of eastern Canada, say that they are the original people; they acknowledge no ancestry; they built villages, and believe that " after making them and their land the Great Spirit made the rest carelessly. " They were related in marriage to Pamola, the terrible One who lived in Ktaadn, and whose son killed game and men by pointing at them. On midsummer day, " the day of sparkling fire," they built a large fire and danced about it — a Phoenician custom, the fire representing the sun. This custom the Acadians modify in their " fire talk" on St. John's Eve, when the priest heaps fragrant boughs before his church and recites prayers as the flames crackle among them. So soon as this is seen the country glitters and the news goes round; for if a death has occurred the farmer dashes out his fire; if sickness, he lets it flicker and die; if all is well, it blazes jubilantly.

A theory that the northern Indians descended from Tyrians and Israelites who came over in 332 b.c. is based on the existence among those tribes of the deluge legend, that of the dove of discovery, and that of the ark of the covenant. The ark, which contains a shell that speaks oracles, understood only by the medicine-men, is never allowed to touch the earth, but is carried by the faithful into battle. When it is advanced among the enemy all rush to its safety, as the Scots pressed about the heart of Bruce when it was thrown among the foe, and as some tribes rallied about the heads of their chiefs when, after death, they were carried into the fight on poles, as standards. The exact whereabouts of this ark remains a mystery not to be revealed to the profane.

But most wide-spread of all beliefs among the red men of the north is that in Nanabush, Manabozho, Glooskap, or Hiawatha, who is buried beneath Thunder Cape, or " the sleeping giant," a basaltic uplift, thirteen hundred and fifty feet high, at the northwest corner of Lake Superior, and whose deeds of valor and charity are told in many tongues. Some say he was the statesman who federated the Six Nations and preached arbitration. He took on human form to benefit mankind, but often went away and dwelt with birds in a great space and great light. He came from the east in a granite boat, with a woman who was not his wife, for he never took one. When on a later voyage he gave room in his boat to a woman of evil character — as was proved by the storm that arose about him — he sprang ashore, leaving her to drift about until she became a shark. Hiawatha figures sometimes as creator, sometimes as Messiah, sometimes as a Noah who was saved from the deluge, and who sent forth the bird called the diver from his boat, to learn if the earth was emerging from the waters. On their subsidence he became the father of a new race, and walked over all America. In some legends he is the Hare, and the Hare was the sun. His foe, the snake prince, the god of evil, whom he destroyed, has been thought to be a comet. Another foe, the giant frog, vast and cold, squatting over miles of plain, was the great glacier of the ice age. Believing that his father had killed his mother, he chased him to the shores of the Arctic sea. His brother, the Flint, he killed in fight, and the boulders on the plains of Assiniboia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan were the missiles they hurled at each other. In the mission-yard at Victoria, on the North Saskatchewan, was a meteorite that Manitou — possibly Manabozho — had cast down, and the Indians believed that to move it would be to incur his hate, and bring upon them battle, disease, and scarcity of game. White men moved it, and, unhappily for those who had been inveighing against the superstition of the Indians, war, smallpox, politics, and famine quickly followed. In the east he was called Glooskap. Minas Basin, Nova Scotia, was his beaver-pond, dammed at Cape Blomidon, his throne; but when he saw that the pent waters were rising among the villages, to the alarm and distress of the people, he burst the rocks asunder, and swift tides now eddy through " the Gut." Here he fought and killed the Great Beaver, whose bones are the Five Islands, near Parrsboro, though this legend appears also at Sault Sainte Marie. Spencer's Island is his upset kettle.

On Partridge Island he held a great feast with Kitpooseeagoono, and the pair of them ate a whale. Fragments of a great causeway of his building are seen in islands off the shore of the old maritime provinces. He was much in company with his uncle, Great Turtle, and shared many of his adventures. At one time, when he was not at hand, some hostiles caught the Turtle and condemned him to the stake. He rushed into the flames so eagerly that they pulled him out. Then they resolved to cut his throat, whereupon he seized a knife and hacked himself so fiercely that they disarmed him. Finally they agreed that he must be drowned, and this fate seemed to put him in terror, so that he caught at trees as they urged him on; but once at the water's edge the cunning fellow chuckled, dived out of sight, and so escaped. When the English came, Glooskap waded from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia, and either freed his hunting-dogs or turned them to stone, that their cries might not betray the lodges of his people to the strangers. But the red men became evil after they had known the English, and Glooskap, with Great Turtle, entered his white stone canoe and sailed away to the west, singing — some say up the St. Lawrence; others say across the Great Lakes. All nature mourns his return, and the owl, the loon, and other birds and beasts found new voices on the night when he went away.

GLOOSKAP AT MENAGWES

THE spirit of the river St. John having become noisy and audacious, damaging the banks and brawling defiance to the gods, the Great Spirit showed his anger by closing its mouth. The remains of his dam are overhung by the suspension bridge in the present city of St. John. When the tide runs out there is a fall toward the sea, and when the tide runs in the fall tumbles across the reef up-river. This is the only reversible fall in the world, they say, and the lumber barges in the whirl of it, going up or down with the tide, are a sight worth seeing. Were the rock at the foot of the gorge to be blasted, so as to afford free ingress to the salt water, some miles of the land now cultivated and dwelt upon, back of the city, would be permanently flooded. One Indian legend has it that a giant beaver built a dam across the outlet, creating a flood behind it in which all the inland people were drowned. Glooskap visited this point and named it Menagwes. It once befell him to take a long journey for the good of the human race, for he went about teaching men how to build canoes, to smoke pipes, to raise crops, to use paint, to make maple sugar, and, as he left his house unprotected, this chance for injury was not neglected by the wizards and demons that always lurk in good men's shadows. Disguised in thunder-clouds, they wrecked and burned his lodge, slew his friends and servants, and when he returned to find ashes and tokens of strife where had been comfort and peace, his tears fell so fast and free that they were like rain. A few of the wizards he tracked to the site of Pictou, where he slew them. A witch he caught in her lodge, on the site of Liverpool, Nova Scotia, and, after a fight that the stars stood still to see, he tore her into pieces. Then, calling to the whales, he mounted their backs and rode to Newfoundland, and appeared, so towering that his head touched the sky, before other of his enemies, who shrank into the fog in terrified silence. In vain their cunning, for he searched out and destroyed them. Returning to Menagwes, he wept afresh, for his friends were ashes. He could not give life.

THE DOGS OF CLOTE SCAURP

EARLY fishers on the Restigouche who had Indian guides reported a disturbance at night by unearthly noises that hurried through the wood about them. The Indians would draw nearer to the fire, listen to the uncanny laughter and wailing cries, making sure that they were not the calls of owls and panthers, and remark, " Clote Scaurp's hunting-dogs are out." Clote Scaurp, who is only Glooskap under another spelling or pronunciation, lived near the Restigouche, on the narrow Waagan, for a time. In some myths of this locality he is human, in others a demi-god, in more distant ones he appears to be the Old Man of the plains families. But he was a good-natured hero, who hunted more for company than for the joy of killing, and his dogs, though often heard, have never been seen. He talked with birds, beasts, and fishes, and only when he found that any one of them had become savage and cruel would he grow angry. The moon, for instance, was a huge and dangerous beast that went up and down the land devouring and killing, so that all things fled before it. Clote Scaurp set off with his dogs to check its devilish conduct, and, meeting it in the wood, he struck it such a terrific whack with his club that it nearly gave up its life. Not only did it cease to grow from that moment, but it peaked and pined to the thing we see at this day, or night, and clambered into the sky to be out of reach of his weapons. To nearly all other things Clote Scaurp was kind, and earth and his dogs have been sorry without him. As evil tendencies began to show themselves, not only among beasts but also among men — envy, avarice, dishonesty, ruffianism, laziness — he gathered all creatures about him and preached good manners. He helped them to be better by living better himself; but the more he did for them the less they would do for themselves, and they were full of evil will. Unable longer to endure this state, he resolved to say farewell to the creatures he had known; so he called them from woods and fields and waters; but, though he spread a mighty feast, only the brutes attended. The men were wholly ungrateful, and they hated lectures. At the end of the banquet Clote Scaurp and Great Turtle entered their canoe and rowed away toward the setting sun. All the brutes watched sorrowing, and listened to the mournful singing that came fainter and fainter out of the west. When, at last, the beasts broke silence to express their grief, each, to the general astonishment, spoke a different tongue from all the rest, and all fled as in fear, never again to meet in general council. The white owl calls all night, " I am sorry;" and Clote Scaurp's dogs still seek him, howling in the woods along the Restigouche. Two rocks at the foot of Blomidon are called his dogs, and he will awaken them when he returns, they say; but those who have heard them know that they still enjoy their liberty.

THE MISSIONS

ALTHOUGH we concede the benefits given to new lands by commercial enterprise and their conquest by enlightened peoples, in the case of Canada it must be confessed that religious enthusiasm accomplished more, both for the explorers and for the natives, than any other cause. The first men to force a way to the inland lakes, to map the plains, rivers, and mountains, to effect a peace with the savages, were the missionaries, and but for their eagerness for the conversion of the Indians the safety and material development of the country might have been long deferred. The Jesuits were especially courageous. Their enthusiasm defied all threats and survived all torture. One missionary, Father Jogues, was shockingly maltreated, and his hand was chopped off, yet he regarded these things only as passing pains, and kept on with his work. Another, who had been hunted off to the woods, was found there frozen to death, in the attitude of prayer. A missionary on the upper Ottawa was roasted over a slow fire, hot axes were placed about his neck and head, and in mockery he was baptized with boiling water. Yet to his last breath he implored divine protection for his tormentors. After the capture of Fort Ignace, on Lake Simcoe, the missionaries Lalemant and De Brebeuf were cruelly used. The former was covered with bark, roasted, and partly eaten before his voice ceased in prayer. His companion enraged the savages by his indifference, for he seemed careless of suffering, though they kept him alive for three hours to endure it, and at the last they ate his heart, in order that his courage and fortitude might pass into their bodies.

It was such heroism that subdued the savagery of the red men and turned them into poor, dull, ambitionless people, to the comfort of the palefaces, who are now able to cheat them in trade without the risk of so much as a prod in the solar plexus. The contrast between the conduct of the French explorers and that of the soldiers and dealers who arrived later is a contrast between religious France of the seventeenth century and Brummagem of the nineteenth. Even the Hudson Bay and Northwest companies have not escaped censure, for it has been alleged that when a gun paid for as many beaver-skins as would reach to the muzzle of it, the skins packed flat and the gun held upright, the barrel of the weapon grew and grew with each successive year until the Indian, after he had bought it with the peltry, had to borrow a file and cut off a foot of useless metal. And it is a fact that when certain red men received pay in five-dollar bills they readily exchanged one of those pieces of paper for two silver dollars, for they could not read the number on the bill.

Missionaries encouraged the building of shrines and churches, and people who had visions or heard voices were invited to commemorate the circumstance. Our Lady of the Snows, for instance, appeared to a Breton cavalier who had lost his way while hunting on Trois Rivieres, and lighted him to a forge, where he found shelter. In return for this mercy he was induced by the priests to rear a shrine to her at Ville Marie, " the city of the mount," and so it came about that the Church of Our Lady of the Snows was erected on " the priests' farm" in Montreal.

There is a faint and melancholy fear that the missionaries did a little cheating, from purely religious motives. It has been set forth that the giant devil who infested Les Islets Machins, in the St. Lawrence, was not an entirely disingenuous creation. The Jesuits are charged with telling the Indians that he used a pine-tree as a club, that he sprang upon people who were fishing in his neighborhood or innocently paddling up and down the river, and, discovering by an instinct that never erred, which of them had not been baptized, he brained them forthwith, sparing only the Christians. This tale led to so many conversions that the giant fled in disgust, for lack of occupation. So, too, the report that Cap de la Madelaine, on the St. Lawrence, was haunted by a Magdalen who cried all night for Christian burial, may have had its deterrent effect on the thoughtless or immoral among the women of the settlements. The braillard de la Madelaine has been otherwise ascribed to the soul of a murderous wrecker, to a priest who allowed a babe to die without baptism, and to a little boy that alone survived a wreck, though only for a few hours.

Was Christianity taught before the time of the Jesuits? Did the Norsemen teach it? When Cartier landed at Gaspe Basin on the St. Lawrence, and planted a cross on shore with great solemnity, he saw with surprise that the natives made obeisance to this object, as one with which they were familiar, although this was in 1536, and Cartier was supposed to be the first white man in that region. The narrative of the Indians was to the effect that long before, when they had been troubled by a pestilence, their old men had a medicine dream, in which there appeared before them " a man exceedingly beautiful, with a cross in his hand, who bade them return home, make crosses like his, and present them to the heads of families, assuring them that they would find therein a remedy for all their ills." This was done; it worked a cure, and the cross became a talisman from that time forth. Was the " beautiful man" a remembered description of Christ, or was it one of the " white men clothed in wool," of northern tradition, who were undoubtedly Norse explorers? Respecting these latter, the Milicites, or Meliseets, tell of a visit of tall, pale strangers who drove away the red men, built houses of stone, swigged mighty draughts from horns, shouting as they drank, and were overwhelmed by an earthquake that changed the course of the St. John River. The Micmacs — by some alleged to be the lost Beothuks of Newfoundland — tell of a woman's dream, long before Carder's landing, in which she saw an island floating toward the land with trees upon it, and creatures dressed in skins. Next day the island appeared in fact, but it was a ship; the trees were masts, and the creatures were men who spoke in a strange tongue, making signs of friendship. One man, dressed in white, lived among them for a time, and tried to teach a new religion, but, although he found some listeners, the wise men refused to heed him, because the dream had been granted to a woman and not to a medicine-man.

Unqualified praise can be given to the missionaries of all sects and of no sect that have sought for the elevation of the red man, but they have sometimes discovered that he was less of a savage than he looked. The conduct of Chief Joseph, of the Nez Percés, in the war so cruelly and unjustly waged against him, was admirable in its forbearance. Instances of generosity and self-sacrifice are many. A Canadian clergyman, relating to a company of Blackfeet the measures common in civilized states for the care of orphaned children, explained that if his own children were left fatherless his property would be sold, or managed by an executor for their benefit, so that they might continue to secure board, clothing, and education. The Indians were both amused and astonished. " The white people are savages," said one. " When any people die in our camps and leave little children, we take them into our lodges. The best piece of buffalo meat we give to them. We clothe and train them. They are our bone and flesh. They have no father or mother, so we are all fathers and mothers. White people do not love their children. They have to be paid for loving orphans." The respect in which the aborigines hold their ancestors, at least when the latter are dead, is in contrast with the lack of honor that the dead sometimes have from the civilized. There is a cave at Mistassini that the Indians never approach closely, lest they should seem to spy on the ghosts of their fathers, who were buried there in other ages, and who still sit there, holding councils.

And seldom do the Indians hear from the missionaries an eloquence equal to their own. Listen to this prayer of a Piegan to a mountain manitou: " Hear, now, you Chief Mountain, you who stand foremost; listen, I say, to the mourning of the people. Now the days are truly become evil, and are not as they used to be in ancient times. Bat you know: you have seen the days. Under your fallen garments the years lie buried. Then the days were full of joy. The buffalo covered the prairie, and the people were glad. Then they had warm dwellings, soft robes for covering, and the feasting was without end. Hear, now, you Mountain Chief. Listen, I say, to the mourning of the people. Their lodges and their clothing now are made of strange, thin stuff, and the long days come and go without the feast, for our buffalo are gone. The drum now is useless, for who would sing and dance while hunger gnawed him? Hear, now, you who stand among the clouds. Pity, I say, your starving people. Give us back those happy days. Once more cover the prairie with real food, so that your children may live again. Hear, I say, the prayer of your unhappy people. Bring back those ancient days. Then will our prayers again be strong. You will be happy, and the aged will die content."

A FEW MONSTERS

IN common with other parts of the continent, and the seas that wash their coasts, the Dominion and its waters have been peopled with strange creatures, some of them the more terrible because they evade sight, touch, definition, and bullets. Now and again the sea-serpent rears his head, snorting, from the brine, and puts for shore at a pace that shames our torpedo-boats, and elderly maidens at the watering-places convincingly resign themselves to hysterics. He — perhaps there is also a she, though it does not seem possible — usually proves to be a porpoise, a sunfish, a white whale, or an octopus; still, "you can't generally 'most always tell, sometimes," and one of the times might have been when he was not a porpoise, but the sea-serpent. The largest devil-fish known, taken on the Newfoundland coast, had a reach of forty feet, and there is no doubt about him, for he was pickled and carried to the States. Either of his arms would have made a more than respectable snake. But all hope has not been abandoned of catching the veritable sea-serpent — the one with eyes like saucepans, with a grinning mouth set with stone-drill teeth, with a weedy mane, with stripes and spots more vivid than a mid-century fashion-plate, and with a braying voice like that of a mule or an agitator. Now and then he leaves his habitat and wallows overland to fresh water. He was seen, for instance, in Skiff Lake, New Brunswick, where he succeeded in stretching himself to a length of only thirty feet.