Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/154

126 But a woman after her meal threw an unclean leaf platter outside the door, and the wind carried it up to heaven. This offended the Lord, who raised the sky to its present position. Finally, Thákur Bábá destroyed mankind, all save one youth and one maiden who were hidden in a cave, and from them a new race was born. Ninda Chando, the kindly Moon, fearing that these might meet a similar fate, pretended to devour the people, of whom only two were saved, who became the morning and the evening stars. When the Sun god saw that some human beings survived, he scattered them in his wrath, and that is why the stars are spread all over the sky. He also cut Ninda Chando in two, and that is why the Moon waxes and wanes; formerly she was always full like the Sun. In another version, the youth and maid had twelve sons and twelve daughters, from whom the twelve races of men are sprung, being graded in rank according to the kind of food which their progenitors chose at a great tribal feast.

Enough has been said to show the value of this interesting contribution to the folklore of India.

Iroquois, although at the same general level of culture as the tribes surrounding them, had developed their political organization far in advance of any other North American tribe, and their folk-tales "were of strength, of great deeds, of nature and the forces of nature, they are the classics of all the unwritten literature of the American aborigines. The Iroquois were a people who loved to weave language in fine metaphor and delicate allusion and possessed a language singularly adapted for this purpose. They were unconscious poets" (p. 10). Mrs. Converse endeavoured "to produce the same