A PIGMY LEGEND.
The memory of every son and daughter of the Saxons will furnish abundance of fairy tales to correspond with the most incredible of those related around Indian firesides. I heard, not long since, a little girl reading “Household Stories,” translated from the German, and on reading her an Indian legend, she exclaimed, “Why, they are like my stories,” and I was myself struck with the resemblance. The stories of “Little Red Ridinghood,” “The Frog Prince,” “The Three Little Men in the Wood,” and a thousand others, have been the delight of Christian children for centuries, and nothing a heathen can relate is more ridiculous than “Mother Goose’s Melodies.” Yet they are a part of our national literature. No man, however wise, would consider himself educated who could not say—
“There was an old woman, and she, and she,
And out of her elbow grew an apple tree.”
“Old mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard, &c.”
“The Midsummer Night’s Dream” of Shakspeare, or Spenser’s “Fairy Queen,” have not been the less admired because they were utterly improbable. I cannot relate any thing so beautiful in the way of Indian fairy stories, but those which I relate, and hundreds which have never been related, are exceedingly beautiful in their own metaphorical language; and I almost falter in attempting to convey any idea of their imaginative creations, in English. The following are faint transcripts of the original: