Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/61

Rh fill up,' en bless you soul! de place fill up sho' miff, en de tree look des 'zackly like nobody ain't bin a-cuttin' on it."

This occurs three times, when, just at the critical moment, as his eggs are all exhausted, his mother sees that the water in the pan has turned to blood and that the willow twig is shaking, so she releases the dogs. The little boy hears them coming, and calls out: "Come on, my good dogs! here, dogs, here!;

The dogs come in the nick of time, and kill the panthers, who are unable to escape, since they have not time to change their axes back into tails. Here the story wanders off to the finding of the small boy's sister, who is rescued from the clutches of "Brer Bar."

There is, I think, no question but that these two stories have a common origin; the resemblance is so strong that it hardly seems necessary to mention it in detail.

The hunter, changed to a little boy in the version of Mr. Harris; who is possessed of two dogs which he rashly leaves at home; who is attacked by wild beasts in human guise who chop with axes the tree into which he climbs to escape them; the miraculous restoration of the trees, and the rescue by the dogs, appear in each narrative.

As I have before stated, nearly a hundred years must have intervened between the telling of the two legends, and the variation in the second is plainly due to the change of scene and of environment which befell the people who preserved and told the story.

It is only the artist who can successfully set a narrative in a scene with which he is not familiar, and make the environment seem real. Folk lore, however, is no artist's tale; it is told by a child of the soil, who unconsciously clothes his narration with the scenes and incidents with which he is best acquainted. The gentleman to whom the story was told in the early part of the century received it from a native African, who had heard it in her own country; while Mr. Harris must have obtained his from a Georgia negro, who had grown up in exile and slavery. The local coloring was, of course, totally different.

The hero in what, if I may be permitted, I shall call the unadulterated version of the story, is a hunter; and this is very natural, for hunting must have been one of the chief occupations among the uncivilized negro tribes of Africa. In Mr. Harris's version he becomes a little boy; but this is perhaps the author's regulation little boy, who figures so often in the "Uncle Remus" stories. In the same way another change, which at, first would seem to be due to local environment, can be shown to be produced by other causes. I refer to the substitution in the later story of panthers for white cows. In portions of Africa cows can not exist, and, whether this was the case in the region occupied by