Spirit gave him a sister to cheer him. Now, after many years, the young man saw a dream, and told it to his sister. 'Sister,' he said, 'this night will five young men visit you. The Great Spirit forbids you so much as to look up or smile upon the first four of them; but when the fifth comes, you may speak to him and show yourself pleased.' She did so. The first was named Ulama, or Tobacco; and when he was rejected, he fell down and died. The second was Wapako, or Pumpkin; and he died also. The third, Melon, and the fourth, Bean, fared as the others had done; but the fifth, Tamin, or Maize, she received with joy. They were married, and from them the Indians are descended. Tamin buried the rejected suitors, and from their graves sprang tobacco, beans, and melons, of all kinds, and so the tribes were fed.

The following Indian conception of the Aurora Borealis, and the Milky Way, is very striking :

"The death-dance of the spirits,

Warriors with their plumes and war-clubs,
Flaring far away to northward,

The broad, white road in heaven

Pathway of the ghosts, the shadows
Running straight across the heavens,

Crowded with the ghosts, the shadows."

And the Dacotate notion of thunder has, at least, the merit of quaintness. Thunder, they say, is a large bird flying through the air, attended by many young birds: the noise heard is the fluttering of the birds, old and young. The old bird is wise, and hurts no one; but the young are foolish, and do all the harm they can.

We might quote many more examples of the same kind, but we have given enough to illustrate what we have said.

III. Our third mythological element is, the Indian ideal of human perfection, the character which they thought the highest attainable, and to which they sought to conform,-their conception, in short, of a hero, and of the qualities which go to make up one. This ideal evidently differs in various races. Some warrior nations look upon physical strength and fierce courage as the only qualities worthy of men. Now, the Indian ideal of a hero is very peculiar and characteristic. The qualities most valued among them were cunning, fortitude, and perseverance. It is not difficult to discern the influence of the hunter's life in their habits of thought. The hunter's success is earned not so much by force as stratagem; not by courage only, or contempt of

danger, but by endurance and perseverance. Such, then, is their hero. A hunter and warrior, equally formidable to the beasts of the forest and the enemies of his tribe; cautious and temperate in counsel; inexhaustible in resource; never leaving a point exposed; never overlooking an advantage; not to be turned aside by any obstacle; content to wait, but resolved to win; always ready at the moment of action, and cheerful and resigned under defeat. This is scarcely even an exaggerated picture of some of the Indians themselves: their marvellous craft, ingenuity, and endurance, are well known to all readers of Cooper's novels; and their patient submission to death, or any kind of suffering, is no less wonderful. Whenever an Indian was taken prisoner by a hostile tribe, he was always put to death with torture, torn with pincers, or cut to pieces with knives,-his death-agony lasting sometimes for days; yet all this was borne without a murmur, as the natural fate of a captive. To produce such habits of self-control, silence and suppression of emotion was the aim of all their training. This is the real meaning of that fast on attaining to manhood, which all Indians went through.

It must not, however, be inferred from what we have said, that the Indian was deficient in courage. He could be as brave as any one when needful, but he preferred to seek his object by caution and stratagem. So in their traditions are preserved many tales of victory in the open field, but more of skill and cunning. Again, they did not desire, as most savage nations seem to do, to die in battle; such a death they considered a misfortune; their ambition was, to enjoy a long life of success and prosperity, and to die in peace.

IV. The Indian idea of the future state is most important in connexion with their Mythology. The immortality of the soul seems to have been universally believed among them, and an idea of the future state as one of reward and punishment may also be traced. The dead, they taught, started on a long and weary journey of many days' duration; and during this passage, needed food to sustain them, and fires for protection by night. To satisfy these wants, supplies of food were left on every grave, and fires lighted for as many nights as the journey ought to occupy. All these particulars are brought forward constantly in their legends, as in that of Chibiabos. We read that, after his death by drowning, the magicians

"Summoned Chibiabos

From his grave beneath the waters.

Through a chink a coal they gave him;
Ruler in the land of spirits,

Ruler o'er the dead, they made him,
Telling him a fire to kindle

For all those that died hereafter,
Camp-fires for their night encampments,
On their solitary journey.

Four whole days he journeyed onward,
Down the pathway of the dead men,
On the dead men's strawberry feasted.
Crossed the melancholy river,

On the swinging log he crossed it;
Came unto the lake of silver,

In the stone canoe was carried

To the islands of the blessed.

In all this is apparent the usual confusion between body and spirit; sometimes the immortality of the body seems to be implied, sometimes the spirit only is referred to.

:

As to the path of the dead itself, with its several stages, and the adventures to be encountered upon it, the Indian traditions are many and various. One of the most curious is alluded to in the lines quoted above that the abode of the blessed is on islands in the middle of a lake, and that the ghost, on reaching the further shore, had to embark in a stone canoe. If his life had been holy, this strange canoe carried him safely over; if wicked, it sank with him to the bottom; with little children only, it seemed to skim and scarcely touch those waves that swallowed up the guilty. The journey finished, and the traveller arrived, heaven had two chief pleasures in store for him, plenty of game for hunting, and of enemies for scalping; besides, of course, deliverance from hunger and cold, from which the Indians, while living, suffered so much.

This shows us a peculiarly material conception of the unseen world; the idea of feeding the dead, lighting fires for them, and giving them horses to ride, goes further in this direction than any other nation, as far as we are aware, has done. But at the same time, and, perhaps, for this very reason, they give evidence of a very distinct realization of the future state. The Indian knew clearly what pleasures awaited him after death; and this, combined with the fatalism mentioned before, made them meet death with the utmost composure.

There are many other points which we should be glad to examine, in connexion with the Mythology of the American Indians; but we

cannot do so within the limits of a single article; and, probably, enough has been said to give some idea of its general character. We must observe, however, that our remarks apply chiefly to the Indians of the north, especially of the neighbourhood of the lakes. As you go southward, many points of difference appear: in religion, for instance, the worship of the sun predominates more and more; until, in Mexico, it is, or was, almost exclusive. And, though we have been dwelling mainly upon the merits of these legends, it is hardly necessary to say that very many of them there are which possess no merit whatever; but which must have been framed to gratify that mere vulgar love of the marvellous which is stronger in savage than even in civilized nations. Neither do we affirm that most Indians, of any tribe, knew all, or understood all, or believed all, that we have been describing; but we do affirm, that such belief, and such knowledge, may be traced among them and it is not a little remarkable, that a creed and worship so pure, with so much appreciation of the nobler qualities, such intellectual development, should have existed at all in a race so utterly uncivilized; who never have advanced, and seem incapable of advancing, beyond the hunter's state, and who are, therefore, perishing miserably off a land that once was their own.

March, 1858.

L'AMI PERDU.

"Tears, idle tears."

I DREAMED, as I lay sleeping,
That I was still with thee;
I woke, and I was weeping,
Was weeping bitterly.

I saw a grave in my dreaming,

And thought they had laid thee there;
I woke, and my tears were streaming,
Still streaming in despair.

I dreamed, as I lay sleeping,
That thou wert my friend again;
And still I wake, and am weeping,
And dreams and tears are vain!

THE LIVING SECRET.

AN ALLEGORY.

CHAPTER IX.

"Per ignes suppositos cineri doloso."-HORACE.

WHEN James awoke next morning, very fortunately for him, it was too late to allow of his occupying his thoughts with anything else than dressing himself, and getting off to Mr. O'Daly's as quickly as possible.

His way lay through the pleasantest part of Dublin-the broad Sackville causeway, the bustling, mart-crowded Grafton-street, where the booksellers', and jewellers', and millinery shops (the latter with innumerable gaily-dressed and beautiful young ladies standing forth in the windows, to arrange the wares) were now unfolding their shutters, like so many morning flowers that had closed themselves against the sin and cigar-smoke of the night before.

James's destination lay a little beyond St. Stephen's-green. He walked on amid the usual crowd of people that one meets in that street at such an hour-a class more useful to the community and pleasant to see and think of than any that promenade there during the remainder of the twenty-four hours: tidily-dressed clerks, with sticks; their employers, with umbrellas; pretty, modest-looking girls tripping to their places of business; medical students bound for the hospitals; and here and there, at the confectioners' and picture-dealers' windows, little boys in process of going to school.

He

On arriving at Mr. O'Daly's school, which consisted of two large red brick houses, adorned with a stone, gridiron-shaped coping, James was received by Mr. O'Daly, who shook hands with him very warmly, and, after a few kind words, committed him to the care of a tall, hugelimbed man, with a military air, and an aroma as if at one period of his life he had smoked a pipe, and partaken of a dram of raw spirits. was named Sergeant Shields, and was the drill-master of the school, in which he taught the athletic exercise of walking round the play-ground to such young gentlemen as were doomed to penal servitude after schoolhours. Sergeant Shields led the way through several passages into the playground, at one side of which ran a covered shed leading into a huge