ian or two and pick his teeth with their ribs.
The red men had no arms that could prevail against it, but at last the
Holder of the Heavens, hearing their cry for aid, came down and attacked
the insect. Finding that it had met its match, the mosquito flew away so
rapidly that its assailant could hardly keep it in sight. It flew around
the great lake, then turned eastward again. It sought help vainly of the
witches that brooded in the sink-holes, or Green Lakes (near Janesville,
New York), and had reached the salt lake of Onondaga when its pursuer
came up and killed it, the creature piling the sand into hills in its
dying struggles.

As its blood poured upon the earth it became small mosquitoes, that
gathered about the Holder of the Heavens and stung him so sorely that he
half repented the service that he had done to men. The Tuscaroras say
that this was one of two monsters that stood on opposite banks of the
Seneca River and slew all men that passed. Hiawatha killed the other one.
On their reservation is a stone, marked by the form of the Sky Holder,
that shows where he rested during the chase, while his tracks were until
lately seen south of Syracuse, alternating with footprints of the
mosquito, which were shaped like those of a bird, and twenty inches long.
At Brighton, New York, where these marks appeared, they were
reverentially renewed by the Indians for many years.

THE GREEN PICTURE

In a cellar in Green Street, Schenectady, there appeared, some years ago,
the silhouette of a human form, painted on the floor in mould. It was
swept and scrubbed away, but presently it was there again, and month by
month, after each removal, it returned: a mass of fluffy mould, always in
the shape of a recumbent man. When it was found that the house stood on
the site of the old Dutch burial ground, the gossips fitted this and that
together and concluded that the mould was planted by a spirit whose
mortal part was put to rest a century and more ago, on the spot covered
by the house, and that the spirit took this way of apprising people that
they were trespassing on its grave. Others held that foul play had been
done, and that a corpse, hastily and shallowly buried, was yielding
itself back to the damp cellar in vegetable form, before its resolution
into simpler elements. But a darker meaning was that it was the outline
of a vampire that vainly strove to leave its grave, and could not because
a virtuous spell had been worked a