1894-95. | THREE CARRIER 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