Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 July 1886 — An Indian Fairy Tale. [ARTICLE]

An Indian Fairy Tale.

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 around in the grass as proud as if he had slain several braves of another tribe in single combat. He had one-lialf of the wren—a fair half; none of your irregular fractions—cooked at once for a feast of 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 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 uncomfortably small, and the dwarf was furious. He vowed he would pay the sun out. So he got his sister to plait a rape out-rat-ber hair, and having made a slip knot in it he pegged it down on the other side of the bill, close to the fop of it, just where he had noticed the sun was accustomed to go 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. —r- - But the dwarf came home to hi 3 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. So he began preparation 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. Tho hero is a dwarf—and this is an essential point in folk-jest of a people who consider a fine physique the first qualification of manhood—and in his pompous pursuit of very small birds, and subsequent inflation tvhen 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 of the hero, makes no fuss about it; but when the sun is let go by the dormouse he affects to think such trifles as sun catching heneath him, and sets himself seriously to the task of killing another wren. There is a novelty in the flavor of this fooling and—a freshness of scene and circumstances that, so it appears to me, make the absurd story attraotive.— San Francisco Chronicle. A French botanist. M. Buysman, has enumerated 378 species of plants growing in Greenland, and he finds that they resemble those of Lapland more than those of the American continent.