ut in every
case they are false and wrong save the one that a man may hold. The
religious faith of the tribe to which the old black-fellow belonged
formed a pitiful mass of crudities, oddities, and absurdities to the
white men when they came, or to such white men as stopped for a moment
to think on the matter at all. But it was very real to the old
black-fellow, as it was to his comrades and tribesmen, when it came to
be unfolded to them in all the impressive solemnity of fast, vigil, and
ceremony. How could it be otherwise when the ordeal of bodily pain
accompanied every step in the knowledge of the mysteries?

Overhead, by the Southern Cross, a black patch shows in the sky. The
white man calls it the coal-sack, and explains how it comes about. The
black-fellow looked at it in wonder, and worked his brains for the
reason of its existence and the use that it might serve, and gradually,
unconsciously, inexplicably, there crept into the lore of the nomad
tribes the story of its origin and the use it had to serve.

The stars of night were camp-fires, alight on a mighty plain; the
Milky-way was a she-oak grove; and the gentle winds that blew at night
waved the trees and shook the boughs, and so made the fires gleam from
beneath their shadow, fitful and subdued. By every fire a black-fellow
camped on his journey over the plain--the journey that every man must
take when the days of his life were done; for in the long ago a man had
strained till he found what the black patch was. It was an opening
through to the mighty plain; but when he had reached it, he longed for
his brother to join him and wander over it with him. Looking down he saw
his brother, and called to him, and, to help him up, threw down a rope,
up which the brother climbed. But when he also reached the plain, he
wanted to turn back and go down again, and lowered the rope to do so;
but before he could start, he saw that another black-fellow had caught
hold of the rope and was climbing up. And when he came up, he also threw
down the rope again to one of his tribe; and the two brothers, becoming
impatient, set out to march across the plain to where it touched the
earth, where they could get down without the help of the rope.

A falling star, the white men said, was the rope the black-fellows saw;
and they laughed as the blacks crouched down in fear by the camp-fire
when they caught the flash of a shooting star. But that was
afterwards--after the time when the thi