MICMAC MYTHOLOGY 43

less than thirty minutes, thus winning the laurels for his party. In both tales, too, we find a magician who keeps the hurricane securely fastened within his nostrils, and it is very interesting when he removes the stoppages and breathes freely, raising a tempestuous sea, and laying waste whole areas of forest. Kaktoogwasees, the young Thunderer, has better magic in his party than all his enemies combined, and we do not hesitate to congratulate him as he leads home his beautiful bride, the daughter of the Earthquake, who, as described in Legend XXIV., has hair as glossy black as the wing of the raven, cheeks of crimson, and a brow as white as January snow.

Dr. Rand says: " I have not found more than five or six Indians who could relate these queer stories, and most, if not all of these, have now gone. Who the original author was, or how old they are we have no means of knowing.” It is evident that several have been borrowed from the Russians and the Eskimo; such, for example, as relate to characters having flinty hearts, or who keep their hearts hidden away within some half~dozen concentric coatings, living or dead and perhaps all hidden away in the bottom of the sea. Also, if we compare Legend III. in Dr. Rand’s collection with the one entitled " The Weaver’s Son” in Jeremiah Curtin’s “Folklore of Ireland,” we must be convinced that the Micmac Legend is an incomplete version of the Irish story. Some of the Legends may have been borrowed from every people with whom the Micmacs came in contact since their ancestors first began to wander from the highlands of Asia; but, granting that all tales bearing such resembl- ances have been borrowed, it may still be reasonably supposed that most of the Legends of the Micmacs are simply the crystalized thought of a people who had a keen appreciation of the beautiful, living as they did season after season in the most intimate contact with the varied manifestations of nature,——a people whose restless minds were ever on the alert to find some explanation of the workings

of that

“ Divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.”

Many people cannot think of mythology without seeing confused apparitions of Zeus with his family of gods and godesses on old