TEE INDIAN FAIRY BOOK 565 



THE INDIAN FAIKY BOOK 

 BY spencer trotter 



SWAKTHMOEB COLLEGE 



AFTEK our boyish occupation of following cows home from pas- 

 ture, along brambly ways where delay was often invited by 

 some untimely mocker in the shape of a bird that lured us into pursuit, 

 we would go up in the gathering dusk to the house on the hill and 

 listen through the hour before supper to the stories in the Indian Fairy 

 Book. Stillness and an autumnal glimmer of western light; crisp air 

 laden with the smoke of smouldering brush fires — these ever after to 

 be blent, by the subtle alchemy of memory, with the tales of an ancient 

 people. Beyond the sunset light lay the land where these stories had 

 been wrought, yet a country that none might reach by traveling in 

 mortal fashion, for, like the old Phgeacian land, it belonged in those 

 dim regions of the past that only the eye of fancy may behold. We 

 had mapped it out in our minds — its lakes and wide prairies, its farthest 

 verge of forest — but no explorer we knew would ever find it. He might 

 stand on the marge of some far western lake, never before seen by a 

 white man, and gaze across its waters, yet this elusive land would ever 

 be another day's journey beyond his last camp fire. 



In this Indian Fairy Book were gathered the folk tales of aboriginal 

 America — Algonquin and Dakota legends, that might fairly hold a 

 place with those old Celtic tales — the Mabinogion — that have come to 

 us out of so remote a past. Indeed, they have many points in common. 

 Magic weaves its web through the adventures of the men and women 

 who seem more than mortal beings and who yet give to the wonder 

 tales in each of the two groups their vital human interest. In each also 

 there are great personages, cast in heroic mould. There is the same 

 overcoming of evil influences, the same mystical union of men with 

 natural things. Both are of that Juventus Mundi — that far away 

 period over which a strange, dim light broods. It is this effect of sub- 

 dued light, the strange half light, half dark of a shadowy world, that a 

 reader of these aboriginal tales feels most. A " twilight " effect, Mr. 

 Havelock Ellis calls it in writing of the Celtic tale, which lends a 

 peculiar " glamour." And, as this writer has further shown, the effect 

 of " remoteness " as to time and place, of being very far removed from 

 the present or even the medieval world, is another element that adds to 

 this glamour of the old Celtic stories. Sidney Lanier says : 



I think it curious indeed to note how curious those old romances, or 

 Mabinogion, seem to us in spite of the long intimacy and nearness between 

 Welsh and English. They impress most readers with a greater sense of foreign- 



