Page:Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society V.djvu/78

60 which, clothed in fairer diction, may add interest to their pages. The author does not ask that such writers shall acknowledge the source of their inspiration. This is more than he has a right to expect. Our greatest poets have borrowed from sources as obscure and never named their creditors. The author has often, ere now, experienced the pleasure of seeing his thoughts and discoveries blazoned in print over other names. But he ventures to make a few requests of the literary borrower. He begs that the latter will not garble or distort what is here written,—that he will not put alien thoughts into the minds of these pagan heroes; that he will not arm them with the weapons nor clothe them in the habiliments of an alien race; that he will not make them act incongruous parts.

135. Stephen Powers, in his "Tribes of California"326 (page 38), gives, in simple and direct language, the story of how fire came to the Karok nation. A few years after he wrote, some one worked his story into a "poem," which appeared, most artistically illustrated, in one of our leading magazines. In this poem the Coyote, in a quandary, is represented as "stroking his goatee." Coyotes have no goatees; Indians have no goatees. The act of stroking the goatee, in thought or perplexity, is the special mannerism of a nervous American. No allusion could be more out of place in an Indian legend. Should the poet referred to ever select any of the tales in this book to be tortured into a poem, I beg that he will not, even for the sake of making a faulty rhyme, put a beard on the chin of the Navaho Coyote God.