* * * * *

As for the sun-frog, we may hope that he has sunk for ever beneath the
western wave.




A FAR-TRAVELLED TALE.


A modern novelist has boasted that her books are read 'from Tobolsk to
Tangiers.' This is a wide circulation, but the widest circulation in the
world has probably been achieved by a story whose author, unlike Ouida,
will never be known to fame. The tale which we are about to examine is,
perhaps, of all myths the most widely diffused, yet there is no ready way
of accounting for its extraordinary popularity. Any true 'nature-myth,'
any myth which accounts for the processes of nature or the aspects of
natural phenomena, may conceivably have been invented separately,
wherever men in an early state of thought observed the same facts, and
attempted to explain them by telling a story. Thus we have seen that the
earlier part of the Myth of Cronus is a nature-myth, setting forth the
cause of the separation of Heaven and Earth. Star-myths again, are
everywhere similar, because men who believed all nature to be animated
and personal, accounted for the grouping of constellations in accordance
with these crude beliefs. {87} Once more, if a story like that of 'Cupid
and Psyche' be found among the most diverse races, the distribution
becomes intelligible if the myth was invented to illustrate or enforce a
widely prevalent custom. But in the following story no such explanation