Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/123

Rh in a particular class of myths or legends, which come to be made on this wise. We all have more or less of the power of seeing forms of men and animals in inanimate objects, which sometimes have in fact a considerable likeness of outline to what they suggest, but which, in some instances, have scarcely any other resemblance to the things into which fancy shapes them than a rough similarity in the proportions of their longer and shorter diameters. Myths which have been applied to such fancied resemblances, or have grown up out of them, may be collected from all parts of the world, and from races high and low in the scale of culture.

Among the Riccaras, there was once a young Indian who was in love with a girl, but her parents refused their consent to the marriage, so the youth went out into the prairie, lamenting his fate, and the girl wandered out to the same place, and the faithful dog followed his master. There they wandered with nothing to live on but the wild grapes, and at last they were turned into stone, first their feet, and then gradually the upper part of their bodies, till at last nothing was left unchanged but a bunch of grapes, which the girl holds in her hand to this day. And all this story has grown out of the fancied likeness of three stones to two human figures and a dog. There are many grapes growing near, and the Riccaras venerate these figures, leaving little offerings for them when they pass by. So the Seneca Indians affirm that the rounded head-like pebbles on the shore of Lake Canandaigua are the petrified skulls of the devoured tribe disgorged by the great snake in its death-agony.

There was a Maori warrior named Hau, and his wife Wairaka deserted him. So he followed her, going from one river to the next, and at last he came to one where he looked out slyly from the corner of his eye to see if he could discover her. He breathed hard when he reached the place where Wairaka was sitting with her paramour. He said to her, "Wairaka, I am thirsty, fetch me some water." She got up and walked down to the sea with a calabash in each hand. He made her go on until the waves flowed over her shoulders, when he repeated a charm,