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eventually the sun returns, and the loving couple are again married, and live happily for ever after.

The Phoibos Apollo of the Greek legends was, Byron tells us—­

     The lord of the unerring bow,
     The god of life and poetry and light,
     The sun in human limbs arrayed, and brow
     All radiant from his triumph in the fight. 
     The shaft had just been shot, the arrow bright
     With an immortal’s vengeance; in his eye
     And nostril beautiful disdain, and might,
     And majesty flash their full lightnings by,
     Developing in that one glance the deity.”

This fight, so magnificently described, was the sun-god’s battle with Python, the destroyer, the serpent, the dragon, the Comet.  What was Python doing?  He was “stealing the springs and fountains.”  That is to say, the great heat was drying up the water-courses of the earth.

“The arrow bright with an immortal’s vengeance,” was the shaft with which Apollo broke the fiend to pieces and tumbled him down to the earth, and saved the springs and the clouds and the perishing ocean.

When we turn to America, the legends tell us of the same great battle between good and evil, between light and darkness.

Manibozho, or the Great Hare Nana, is, in the Algonquin legends, the White One, the light, the sun.  “His foe was the glittering prince of serpents"-the Comet.[1]

Among the Iroquois, according to the Jesuit missionary, Father Brebeuf, who resided among the Hurons in 1626, there was a legend of two brothers, Ioskeba and Tawiscara, which mean, in the Oneida dialect, the White One, the light, the sun, and the Dark One, the night.

[1.  Brinton’s “Myths,” p. 182.]

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They were twins, born of a virgin mother, who died in giving them life.  Their grandmother was the moon (the water deity), called At-aeusic, a word which signifies “she bathes herself,” derived from the word for water.

“The brothers quarreled, and finally came to blows, the former using the horns of a stag, the latter the wild rose.  He of the weaker weapon was very naturally discomfited and sorely wounded.  Fleeing for life, the blood gushed from him at every step, and as it fell turned into flint-stones.  The victor returned to his grandmother in the far east, and established his lodge on the borders of the great ocean, whence the sun comes.  In time he became the father of mankind, and special guardian of the Iroquois.  The earth was at first arid and sterile, but he destroyed the gigantic frog which had swallowed all the waters, and guided the torrents into smooth streams and lakes.  The woods he stocked with game; and, having learned from the great tortoise who supports the world how to make fire, taught his children, the Indians, this indispensable art. . . .  Sometimes they spoke of him as the sun, but this is only figuratively."[1]