Pure food for some pure nymph.  The wasp-gods would be forgotten; probably smoked out as sacrilegious intruders.  The lucky seer or poet who struck out the fancy would soon find imitators; and it would become, after a while, a common and popular superstition that Hamadryads haunted the hollow forest trees, Naiads the wells, and Oreads the lawns.  Somewhat thus, I presume, did the more cheerful Hellenic myths displace the darker superstitions of the Pelasgis and those rude Arcadian tribes who offered, even as late as the Roman Empire, human sacrifices to gods whose original names were forgotten.

But even the cultus of nymphs would be defiled after awhile by a darker element.  However fair, they might be capricious and revengeful, like other women.  Why not?  And soon, men going out into the forest would be missed for awhile.  They had eaten narcotic berries, got sun-strokes, wandered till they lost their wits.  At all events, their wits were gone.  Who had done it?  Who but the nymphs?  The men had seen something they should not have seen; done something they would not have done; and the nymphs had punished the unconscious rudeness by that frenzy.  Fear, everywhere fear, of Nature—­the spotted panther as some one calls her, as fair as cruel, as playful as treacherous.  Always fear of Nature, till a Divine light arise, and show men that they are not the puppets of Nature, but her lords; and that they are to fear God, and fear naught else.

And so ends my true myth of the wasp-tree.  No, it need not end there; it may develop into a yet darker and more hideous form of superstition, which Europe has often seen; which is common now among the Negros; {223} which we may hope, will soon be exterminated.

This might happen.  For it, or something like it, has happened too many times already.

That to the ancient women who still kept up the irrational remnant of the wasp-worship, beneath the sacred tree, other women might resort; not merely from curiosity, or an excited imagination, but from jealousy and revenge.  Oppressed, as woman has always been under the reign of brute force; beaten, outraged, deserted, at best married against her will, she has too often gone for comfort and help—­and those of the very darkest kind—­to the works of darkness; and there never were wanting—­there are not wanting, even now, in remote parts of these isles—­wicked old women who would, by help of the old superstitions, do for her what she wished.  Soon would follow mysterious deaths of rivals, of husbands, of babes; then rumours of dark rites connected with the sacred tree, with poison, with the wasp and his sting, with human sacrifices; lies mingled with truth, more and more confused and frantic, the more they were misinvestigated by men mad with fear:  till there would arise one of those witch-manias, which are too common still among the African Negros, which were too common of old among the men of our race.