1894-95, J THREE CARRIEIl MYTHS. 25 



Sodom and Gomorrha? It may seem strange that a historical event 

 of comparatively so local an importance should be commemorated in the 

 folk-lore of an American people. Yet it might perhaps be explained 

 that the awfulness of its nature compensates for the limitedness of the 

 territory which it affected. I may be mistaken in my interpretation of 

 this, as indeed in that of the preceding myth ; but I cannot help seeing 

 therein some resemblance to the story of Sodom's prevarication and 

 chastisement, and a corresponding dissimilitude from any other event 

 recorded either by history or mythology. Let us rather analyse the main 

 points of our present legend and compare them with the Biblical recital. 



And here I must premise an important remark. This myth, in com- 

 mon with the preceding, recounts the story of a crime and its conse- 

 quences ; but a very little reflection will make it clear that the guilt 

 pointed out as material for punishment is, in the second legend, of a quite 

 different nature from that of the first. In the first story, we see criminal 

 relations of a woman with a serpent punished by the death of the 

 woman and the wretchedness of her children. In the second, we have 

 also guilty intercourse of a married woman with a person other than her 

 husband ; but, let it be carefully noted, this is not put down as the cause 

 of the conflagration that ensues. After her unseemly conduct, the 

 woman suffers no other pain or anguish than regret for the death of her 

 lover, while the whole country, and with it a large portion of the people, 

 are burnt down in expiation of the attempted crime of the beautiful 

 young man with the outraged husband. Can sodomy be more graphic- 

 ally described or its punishment better assimilated to that of the ungodly 

 inhabitants of the plain cities ? 



The husband here, no less than the God-fearing Lot of the Bible, 

 escapes free ; while the cause of the conflagration, the voluptuous young 

 man, in common with the majority of the population, pays with his life 

 his unnatural crime. 



The gathering of the sap or cambium layer of the pine with the apo- 

 logue of the little red-headed woodpecker are naturally nothing else than 

 the pod which contains the fruit, the shell that conceals the pearl, namely, 

 the historical fact. So much so, that these circumstances vary with the 

 locality of the narrator, while the nature of the guilt itself with its con- 

 sequences remains identical. 



The native fondness for the apologue is no doubt responsible for the 

 anecdote at the end, no less than for the transformation of the young 

 man's head into a bird's scalp. Unable to account for the fact related 

 by their ancestors, the aborigines must have thought they had discovered 



