Every time he called her, and
there was no answer. In the morning he shook her. She was dead. She had
died by the poison of the serpent. They sunk her in the pond where the
snake lived.
[Illustration: THE WOMAN AND THE SERPENT]
I do not omit this ghastly and repulsive legend for the following reasons:
One might hastily conclude, from its resemblance to the old legend of the
origin of the Merovingian family, that this idea of the woman with the
horrible water spirit for a lover was of Canadian French origin. But a
story like it in the main detail is told by the Indians of Guiana, and
that of the Faithless Wife, given in Rink's Tales and Traditions of the
Eskimo (p. 143), is almost the same. But in the latter the husband
revenges himself by stuffing the woman full of poisonous vermin. Rink
says that he had five different versions of this tale, and that one was
from Labrador, a country often traveled by the Micmacs, and even by the
Penobscots and Passamaquoddies; I myself knowing one of the latter who
has been there. I conjecture that this tale sets forth the aboriginal
idea of the origin of a certain disease supposed to have come from
America. It is popularly believed among the vulgar that this disease can
be transferred to another person, thereby removing it from the first. Of
this the Rev. Thistleton Dyer, in his Folk Lore of Shakespeare, says,
"According to an old but erroneous belief, infection communicated to
another left the infecter free; in allusion to which Timon of Athens
(Act IV.
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