myriad manifestations of the Mighty Mother
and her many children; and a poet by instinct,
he framed odd stories with which to convey his
explanations to others. And these stories were
handed down from father to son, with little
variation, through countless generations, until
the white man slaughtered the buffalo, took to
himself the open country, and left the red man
little better than a beggar. But the tribal
story-teller has passed, and only here and there
is to be found a patriarch who loves the legends
of other days.

OLD-man, or Napa, as he is called by the
tribes of Blackfeet, is the strangest character
in Indian folk-lore. Sometimes he appears as
a god or creator, and again as a fool, a thief,
or a clown. But to the Indian, Napa is not the
Deity; he occupies a somewhat subordinate
position, possessing many attributes which have
sometimes caused him to be confounded with
Manitou, himself. In all of this there is a curi-
ous echo of the teachings of the ancient Aryans,
whose belief it was that this earth was not the
direct handiwork of the Almighty, but of a
mere member of a hierarchy of subordinate gods.
The Indian possesses the highest veneration for
the Great God, who has become familiar to the
readers of Indian literature as Manitou. No
idle tales are told of Him, nor would any Indian