Page:Curious myths of the Middle Ages (1876).djvu/205

 seen seated with his bundle of fagots on his back.

In Schaumburg-lippe, the story goes, that a man and a woman stand in the moon, the man because he strewed brambles and thorns on the church path, so as to hinder people from attending Mass on Sunday morning; the woman because she made butter on that day. The man carries his bundle of thorns, the woman her butter-tub. A similar tale is told in Swabia and in Marken. Fischart says, that there “is to be seen in the moon a manikin who stole wood,” and Prætorius, in his description of the world, that “superstitious people assert that the black flecks in the moon are a man who gathered wood on a Sabbath, and is therefore turned into stone.”

At the time when wishing was of avail, say the North Frisians, a man, one Christmas eve, stole cabbages from his neighbour’s garden. When just in the act of walking off with his load, he was perceived by the people, who conjured him up into the moon. There he stands in the full moon to be seen by every body, bearing his load of cabbages to all eternity. Every Christmas eve