Page:Beside the Fire - Douglas Hyde.djvu/42

xxxviii condition as the Australian blacks or the Indians of California are to-day.

Again, in another story we hear of a boat that sails equally swiftly over land and sea, and goes straight to its mark. It is so large that if all the men in the world were to enter it there would remain place for six hundred more; while it is so small that it folds up into the hand of the person who has it. But ships do not sail on land, nor grow large and small, nor go straight to their mark; consequently, it is plain that we have here another nature myth, vastly old, invented by pre-historic man, for these ships can be nothing but the clouds which sail over land and sea, are large enough to hold the largest armies, and small enough to fold into the hand, and which go straight to their mark. The meaning of this has been forgotten for countless ages, but the story has survived.

Again, in another tale which I found, called "The Bird of Sweet Music," a man follows a sweet singing bird into a cave under the ground, and finds a country where he wanders for a year and a day, and a woman who befriends him while there, and enables him to bring back the bird, which turns out to be a human being. At the end of the tale the narrator mentions quite casually that it was his mother whom he met down there.