THE BASKET WOMAN
A BOOK OF INDIAN TALESFOR CHILDREN
BY
MARY AUSTIN
SCHOOL EDITION
BOSTON, NEW YORK, AND CHICAGO
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY MARY AUSTIN
COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PREFACE
In preparing this volume of western myths forschool use the object has been not so much toprovide authentic Indian Folk-tales, as to presentcertain aspects of nature as they appearin the myth-making mood, that is to say, inthe form of strongest appeal to the child mind.Indian myths as they exist among Indians aretoo frequently sustained by coarse and cruelincidents comparable to the belly-ripping jokein Jack the Giant Killer, or the blinding ofGloucester in King Lear, and when presentedin story form, too often fall under the misapprehensionof the myth as something inventedand added to the imaginative life. It is, in fact,the root and branch of man's normal intimacywith nature.
So slowly does the mind awaken to the realizationof consciousness and personality as by-productsof animal life only, that few escapecarrying over into adult life some obsession[Pg iv]of its persistence in inanimate things, say ofmalevolence in opals or luckiness in a rabbit'sfoot, or the capacity of moral discriminationagainst their victims residing in hurricanesand earthquakes. The chief preoccupation ofthe child in his earlier years is the business ofabstracting the items of his environment fromthis pervading sense, and ascribing to themtheir proper degrees of awareness. He arrivesin a general way at knowing that it hurts thecat's tail to be stepped on because the catcries, and that it does not hurt the stick. Butif the stick were provided with a squeakingapparatus he would be much longer in theprocess, and if the stick becomes a steed or adoll it is quite possible for him to weep withsympathetic pain at the abuse of it.
He sees the tree and it is alive and sentientto him; you cut a stick horse from its boughs,and that is separately alive; cut the stick againinto two horses, and they will prance whole andsatisfying. Later when the game is playedout, the stick may burn and furnish live flameto dance, live smoke to ascend, live ash to be[Pg v]treated with contumely; all of which arisesnot so much in the mere trick of invention asin the natural difficulty in thinking of objectsfreed from consciousness, almost as great asthe philosopher's in conceiving empty space.There is a period in the life of every childwhen almost the only road to the understandingis the one blazed out by the myth-makingspirit, kept open to the larger significanceof things long after he is apprised that thethunder did not originate in the smithy of thegods no