The female sex is further represented in the Maya folk-lore by a personage who has a curious similarity to legendary ladies of the old world, sirens, mermaids, the Lorelei, and others. She is called X tabai, the (female) Deceiver. Her home is under shady bowers in the forests, and there the ardent hunter suddenly espies her, clothed, and combing with a large comb (x ache) her long and beautiful hair. As he approaches she turns and flees, but not with discouraging haste, rather in such a manner and with such backward glances as to invite pursuit. He soon overtakes her, but just as he clasps her beauteous form in his strong embrace, her body changes into a thorny bush, and her feet become claws like those of a wild fowl. Tom and bleeding he turns sadly homeward, and soon succumbs to an attack of fever with delirium.
Another very similar creature is X Thoh Chaltun, Miss Pound-the-Stones. She slily waits around the villages, and when she sees some attractive youth she awakes his attention by tapping on the stones, or in default of these on an empty jar which she carries for the purpose. Does the foolish youth respond to the seductive invitation, she coyly moves to the woods, where the amorous pursuer meets like disappointment and a similar sad fate as the victim of the X tabai.
As may be supposed, many superstitions cling around the animal world. Each species of brute has its king, who rules and protects it. Even the timid native hare may thus assert its rights. An Indian told Dr. Berendt that once upon a time a hunter with two dogs followed a hare into a cave. There he found a large hole, leading under the earth. He descended, and came to the town of the hares. They seized him and his dogs, and brought him before the king, and it was no easy matter for him to get off by dint of protests and promises.
There are also tales of the Straw Bird or Phantom Bird. The hunter unexpectedly sees a handsome bird on a branch before him. He fires and misses. He repeats his shot in vain. After a while it falls of itself, and proves to be nothing but a colored feather. Then he knows that he has been fooled by the Zohol chich.
An object of much dread is the Black Tail, Ekoneil, an imaginary snake with a black, broad, and forked tail. He glides into houses at night where a nursing mother is asleep; and, covering her nostrils with his tail, sucks the milk from her breasts.
These are probably but a small portion of the superstitions of the modern Mayas. They are too reticent to speak of these subjects other than by accident to the white man. He is quite certain either to ridicule or to reprove such confidences. But what is above collected is a moderately complete, and certainly, as far as it goes, an accurate notion of their folk-lore.
FOLK-LORE OF THE MODERN LENAPE.[[199]]
In August 1886, and September 1887, I had many conversations with the Rev. Albert Seqaqknind Anthony, an educated Delaware Indian, then assistant missionary to the Six Nations, in Ontario, Canada. Our immediate business was the revision of the “Lenâpé-English Dictionary,” which has since been published by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; but in the intervals of that rather arduous and dry labor, we sought recreation in broader subjects of thought, and our discourse often fell on the ancient traditions, folk-lore, and customs of the Lenâpé, now fast disappearing.
Mr. Anthony was on his father’s side a Delaware, or Lenâpé, of the Minsi tribe, while his grandmother was a Shawnee. He himself was born on the Ontario Reservation, and up to his thirteenth year spoke nothing but pure Lenâpé. His memory carries him back to the fourth decade of this century.
One of his earliest reminiscences was of the last surviving emigrant from the native home of his ancestors in Eastern Pennsylvania—a venerable squaw (ochquèu, woman, hen), supposed to be a hundred years old. At the time her parents left the mountains between the Lehigh and Susquehanna rivers, she was “old enough to carry a pack”—twelve years, probably. This must have been about 1760, as after the French War (1755) the natives rapidly deserted that region.