It was perhaps well for him that he had thus withdrawn himself. In the first moments of disgust and suspicion the men might have handled him roughly.

But when the news of the discovery spread to the camp, and the trinkets were handled, several men recognised them—one man one thing, one man another-as having belonged to Will Keane. then people fell to discussing his sudden disappearance, and to doubting that old story of his brother (now a debased hanger-on of the camp), who said that he himself had driven him over the ridge to the Fork.

They sought out Henry Keane, with doubt fast turning to suspicion. And that suspicion at once leaped to certainty. For he made no attempt to deny his guilt. Needless to recount a painful story of brotherly love quenched in a rising flood of jealousy; of long-stifled anger vented in sudden and blind fury upon the unconsciouslyoffending man rather than upon the erring woman; and of the huddling away stealthily by night of the relics of the crime in the well that Will Keane had just begun to dig but was never to complete.

But as the self-convicted fratricide drew to the end of his confession he suddenly lifted his head; a wild light, almost of insanity, gleamed in his eyes, and a shudder seemed to haunt his voice, as he said:

"But one night, when the first snow had fallen, I looked out at midnight from the cabin door. The moon was full and high; the centre of the valley was bright as day. And there, over the spot where he was lying dead, I saw, stretched out upon the snow, the Shadow. The shadow of a man. And one night my wife saw it too. Then, though she did not know, I think-God help me!(his voice fell)" sometimes I think-she guessed."

He made no appeal for his life; no attempt to evade his doom. In a few hours he had suffered the extreme and summary penalty of Western law.

And I remember how white-haired Judge Rush, looking back at the old sycamore, said:

"Boys, he's what I call 'effectually bound over to keep the peace.""

There was a mystery about the discovery of the crime, and I was determined to sift it to the bottom.

The divining-rod in the hands of the Indian had been the means of bringing the ghastly deed to light.

Did he know?-had he seen?

He was more communicative with me than he would have been

with any other man, for we had been so long on friendly terms; but from his broken English I gathered nothing but the reason for that passing agitation of his, at the moment when, after sticking the divining-rod in the ground, he had so hurriedly withdrawn.

He had been startled on noticing the spot which the rod had indicated. For it was a spot that he honoured with a mixture of superstition and reverence.

It seems that the valley at the head of the Mule Horn had, since it was cleared of timber, been known to his tribe as the "Valley of Mani. tou," or the "Valley of the Shadow," because, when the valley was covered with snow, and the broad full moon looked down upon it, a shadow lay upon the open flat-a shadow which was unnatural-the shadow of Manitou. The valley lies due north and south, and the cliffs which wall it in are so high and precipitous that the moon shines in upon it only for an hour or two each night; and when it crossed the meridian at no great altitude, and shone obliquely, then this shadow was thrown in a broad line up the ravine; but when the moon was full and passed high overhead, the shadow was concentrated as the orb approached the zenith, until there became vividly outlined, in the deepest purple upon the brightly-lit snow, the form of a man stretched at full length. And it was to the spot where this shadow fell that the rod, in broad daylight, had pointed.

I had now heard so much about this shadow, openly and by inference, that I became possessed of a desire to see the uncanny thing for myself.

"Look here," I said, when I found that my Indian friend had nothing more to reveal; "the next snow that falls we will go up there together and spend the night-at the full moon."

He consented.

We had not long to wait. Just before the moon was full, the snow came down. A day later I appointed to meet my friend at the "gap" by the stream, where we had first met, and in the afternoon I started. Half way there I met the new proprietor coming down with a well-filled sack on his back.

"Goin' to spend a day or two in camp," he explained; "lonesome up there, it is, these sort o' nights, with nobody to talk to," and on he went, as so many of his predecessors had gone before him.

At the appointed spot I met the Indian, and, together, we walked up to the hut. All was calm and mantled in the purest white, save for the background of the grey cliffs over which the gaunt pines peered from above. The solitude of the place was to me more oppressive than I had ever noticed it before. Almost it seemed as

if the world had cooled (as some day perhaps it may), and that we two were the sole representatives of two long-forgotten races of men upon the once populous globe. And so we entered the hut. Small trace of his short occupancy had the late proprietor left there.

At twelve o'clock-for not till then would I stir-we opened the door and looked out.

The moon was high above us; not a breath from heaven swayed the over-reaching pines upon the silent cliffs; all around us was quiet, and calm, and pure. The earth lay covered with a spotless veil, as though to blot out all memory and record of crime or sin that here had been committed.

But there, in front of us, and upon the exact spot where we had expected to see it, lay a shadow-outlined, not (as I had expected) in purple, but in deepest black; and we advanced upon it.

Could it be fancy? No, it was too distinct.

But as we drew near, I saw that it did not assume the figure of a man reclining, as I had been led to expect, and as my own fancy had at first dictated.

It was the shadow of a cross !

As we watched it it gradually lengthened out, and, at last, as the moon fell below the pine tops on the cliff, faded away.

And my companion whispered, mysteriously,

"Manitou !-Hanta-pah-Aryskoui!"-(It is the mark of the God of War)" Whacta !"-(it is good).

MYTHS OF THE GREAT DEPARTED.

A STUDY IN LEGENDARY FOLK-LORE.

THE

HE most superficial student of folk-lore and tradition cannot fail to be struck by the constant recurrence, in regions the most remote from each other, and among the most diverse races, of certain myths, legends and märchen, not merely identical in their more essential features, for this might be accounted for by the identity, all over the world, of that subsoil of human nature in which tradition takes root, but bearing a strong resemblance to one another, even in those minuter details which we might well expect to vary with the circumstances of time, place, and surroundings, or with the fancy of each narrator. Several explanations of this phenomenon have been suggested by the mythologists. Setting aside the theory of direct borrowing, which in many, perhaps in most, cases appears wholly untenable, the two most probable opinions are the following:-First, that human nature is everywhere essentially the same, and that this sameness appears in the products of the human intellect and imagi nation; secondly, that throughout the ages during which men have dwelt upon the globe, a constant interchange of traditions and beliefs has taken place among them, leading to the gradual but complete diffusion throughout all nations of the myths and traditions of each. Both of these agencies have, no doubt, been very largely at work; but, though sufficient to account for the sameness apparent in the broader features of these myths, they are altogether inadequate to explain that coincidence in point of detail to which we have before alluded-a phenomenon for which a satisfactory explanation yet remains to be found.

However, our present task is not to investigate the causes which have led to the universal diffusion of these world-myths, as they may be called, but to examine one single class of them, a class which yields to few, if any, in the favour it has enjoyed among all nations and in all ages. In every part of the world, and among peoples in every stage of civilisation or barbarism, we find legends relating how

some national hero or sage, at the end of his earthly career, is transported to some supernatural abode without having tasted of death. The story often concludes with a prophecy that the vanished hero shall some day come again to establish a reign of righteousness and prosperity among his people. This myth, in one form or another, exists among the Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Hindus, Persians, Germans, Franks, Irish, Welsh, Cornish, Bretons, Danes, Finns, Aztecs, Algonquins, Hurons, and many other nations, both civilised and savage.

One of the best known or, at any rate, most complete forms of this myth, is that of the German Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, or Rothbart, who, tradition tells, is not dead, but dwells in a cavern in the heart of the Kyffhausen mountain, until the appointed time is come when he shall issue forth, and rule over a united Germany in power and might. He now sits within his mountain hall, asleep at the head of a massive stone table, through which his beard has grown, half waking, from time to time, to partake of food and drink, with which he is supplied by an old man, his attendant. His subterranean abode is not hermetically sealed; many have found it from time to time, or have been conducted thither by the old man who waits upon the slumbering monarch. These favoured individuals generally seem to have been liberally treated, and dismissed with gifts of gold of ancient coinage, and wine such as they had never before tasted in the course of their lives. However, like most recipients of supernatural bounty, these persons oftener than not forfeited their gifts by their own misconduct. Whenever a stranger finds his way, or is led, into the hall, the Redbeard raises his head, and asks, "Do the ravens still fly about the hills?" And upon being told that they do, he rejoins, "Then I must sleep for another hundred years."

Mr. Patrick Kennedy' records an Irish legend, which bears a remarkable likeness to that of the German Emperor. "Once upon

a time," Gearoidh Iarla (i.e. Earl Gerald), a scion of the great house of Geraldine, was a mighty chieftain in Ireland-a lover of justice, and the mainstay of his countrymen in their resistance to English tyranny. He was also a great "medicine man," and possessed the power of transforming himself into any animal he pleased. His wife often wanted him to let her see him in some of these shapes, but he always refused to comply with her desire, alleging that, if she experienced any terror at such a time, some calamity would befall him, from which he would not recover until many generations of men had passed away. At length, however, he yielded to her importunities, and assumed the form of a beautiful goldfinch. The lady, though 'Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts.