According to Mr. Duncan, the well-known missionary to certain of the native tribes of British Columbia, these Indians of the far west have a version of this legend: "One night a child of the chief class awoke and cried for water. Its cries were very affecting—'Mother, give me to drink!' but the mother heeded not. The moon was affected and came down, entered the house, and approached the child, saying, 'Here is water from heaven: drink.' The child anxiously laid hold of the pot and drank the draught, and was enticed to go away with the moon, its benefactor. They took an underground passage till they got quite clear of the village, and then ascended to heaven" (468. 35, 36). The story goes on to say that "the figure we now see in the moon is that very child; and also the little round basket which it had in its hand when it went to sleep appears there."
The Rev. George Turner reports a Polynesian myth from the Samoan Islands, in which the moon is represented as coming down one evening and picking up a woman, and her child, who was beating out bark in order to make some of the native cloth. There was a famine in the land; and "the moon was just rising, and it reminded her of a great bread-fruit. Looking up to it, she said, 'Why cannot you come down and let my child have a bit of you?' The moon was indignant at the idea of being eaten, came down forthwith, and took her up, child, board, mallet, and all." To this day the Samoans, looking at the moon, exclaim: "Yonder is Sina and her child, and her mallet and board." Related myths are found in the Tonga Islands and the Hervey Archipelago (468. 59).
The Eskimo of Greenland believed that the sun and the moon were originally human beings, brother and sister. The story is that "they were playing with others at children's games in the dark, when Malina, being teased in a shameful manner by her brother Anninga, smeared her hands with the soot of the lamp, and rubbed them over the face and hands of her persecutor, that she might recognize him by daylight. Hence arise the spots in the moon. Malina rushed to save herself by flight, but her brother followed at her heels. At length she flew upwards, and became the sun. Anninga, followed her, and became the moon; but being unable to mount so high he runs continually round the sun in hopes of some time surprising her" (468. 34).
There are many variants of this legend in North and in Central America.
In her little poem The Children in the Moon, Miss Humphrey has versified an old folk-belief that the "tiny cloudlets flying across the moon's shield of silver" are a little lad and lass with a pole across their shoulders, at the end of which is swinging a water-bucket. These children, it is said, used to wander by moonlight to a well in the northward on summer nights to get a pail of water, until the moon snatched them up and "set them forever in the middle of his light," so that—
"Children, ay, and children's children,
Should behold my babes on high;
And my babes should smile forever,
Calling others to the sky!"
Thus it is that—
"Never is the bucket empty,
Never are the children old,
Ever when the moon is shining
We the children may behold" (224. 23-25).
In Whittier's Child Life, this poem is given as "from the
Scandinavian," with the following additional stanzas:—
"Ever young and ever little,
Ever sweet and ever fair!
When thou art a man, my darling,
Still the children will be there.