Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 January 1886 — Indian Humor. [ARTICLE]

Indian Humor.

Once upon a time there was a dwarf, so very small in size that when he killed a wren—all by himself, too—he thought he was a hero in the first degree, and strutted round in the grains, as proud as if he had slain several braves of another tribe in single combat; He had onehalf of the wren—a fair half; none of your irregular fractions—cooked at once for a feast for “the whole lodge, and told his sister to cure the skin, as he had a mind to make himself a feather coat. And by and by he did put another wren to death, and then he got his coat* But happening to go to sleep one day in the sunshine, the heat made the birds’ skins shrivel up so that they became quite uncomfor ably small, and the dwarf was furious. He vowed he would pay the sun out. So he got his sister to plait a rope out of her hair, and, having made a slip-knot in it, he pegged it down on the other side of the hill, close to the top of it, just where he had noticed the sun was accustomed to get up. And, sure enough, when the sun rose the next morning, it ran its head right into the slip-knot and got caught. The consternation in nature was prodigious, until the dormouse, remarking what was the matter,, went and nibbled the plait through and released the luminary, whereupon everything went on just as if nothing had happened. ' But the dwarf-came home to his sister in high dudgeon. He was not going, he said, to bother himself about suns any more. It was not worth his while: He had more serious matters to attend to. And he began making preparations for going out on another wren-hunt. _. Such, in the bald outline, is a red Indian “fairy story,” which seems to me to illustrate fairly well the tone of the humor of the aboriginal American. The hero is a dwarf—and this is an .essential point in the folk jests of a people who consider a find physique the first qualification of manhood—and in his pompous pursuit of very small birds, and subsequent inflation when he is successful in the chase, the leading characteristics of the red man are slyly burlesqued. He succeeds in an impossible exploit, and, in the true spirit ofjk hero, makes no lubs about it, but when the sun is let go by the dormouse; he affects to think such trifles as sun-catch-ing beneath him, and sets himself seriously to the task of killing another There is a novelty in the flavor of this fooling, and a freshness of scene and circumstance that, so it appears to me, make the absurd story very attractive.—San Francisco Ingleside.