Music — Poetry — Fiction 



among them. He told her how a snake lay coiled up under the 1 880-8 1 

 ground beneath the village, and how he crept out and poisoned 

 the springs, because he lived upon human beings and craved 

 their flesh more and more, so that he could never get enough if 

 they died from natural causes. 



Hi-nu n kept the maiden in til he learned that the ugly old suitor 

 was dead. Then he bade her return and tell her tribe what she 

 had learned of the great Hi-nu n . 



She taught them all he had told her and begged them to break 

 up their settlement and travel nearer to the lake; and her words 

 prevailed. For a while sickness ceased, but it broke out again, 

 for the serpent was far too cunning to be so easily outwitted. He 

 dragged himself slowly but surely after the people, and but for 

 Hi-nu n 's influence would have undermined the new settlement as 

 he had the former one. Hi-nu n watched him until he neared the 

 creek, then he launched a thunderbolt at him. A terrible noise 

 awoke all the dwellers by the lake, but the snake was only 

 injured, not killed. Hi-nu n was forced to launch another thunder- 

 bolt, and another and another, before, finally, the poisoner was 

 slain. 



The great dead snake was so enormous that when the Indians 

 laid his body out in death it stretched over more than twenty 

 arrow flights, and as he floated down the waters of Niagara it 

 was as if a mountain appeared above them. His corpse was too 

 large to pass the rocks, so it became wedged in between them and 

 the waters rose over it mountains high. As the weight of the 

 monster pressed on the rocks they gave way and thus the horse- 

 shoe form, that remains to this day, was fashioned. But the 

 Indians had no more fever in their settlement. 



The same legend is given with additional details in Morgan, Lewis H., 

 League of the Ho-De-No-San-Nee, or Iroquois, page 158, published 

 by Lage & Bro. at Rochester, 1 85 1 . 



1881 



CoLES, ABRAHAM. A Sabbath at Niagara. (In his The microcosm 1881 

 and other poems. N. Y.: D. Appleton and Co. 1881. Pp. 226-235.) Coles 



781 



