the strange creature, with the four legs and the old
"bow, wow, wow."

Four moons passed, and brought no change of scene to the mother of the
world. By night, her dreams were ever the same: there was always the
same dear and beloved being, each day dearer and more beloved, coming
with the shades, and departing with the sun, folding her in its arms,
breathing balm on her lips, and pressing her bosom with its downy cheek.
By day, the dog was always at her side, whether she went to gather
berries or cresses, or to lave her limbs in the stream. Whenever the dog
was there, the more beloved being was not; when night came, the dog as
surely disappeared, and the other, seen in dreams, supplied his place.
But she herself became changed. She took no more joy in the scenes which
once pleased her. The pines she had planted throve unnoticed; the
creeping birch stifled the willow and the juniper, and she heeded it
not; the sweetest berries grew tasteless--she even forgot to visit her
pretty sister, the rose. Yet she knew not the cause of her sudden
change, nor of the anxiety and apprehension which filled her mind. Why
tears bedewed her cheeks till her eyes became blind, why she trembled at
times, and grew sick, and feinted, and fell to the earth, she knew not.
Her feelings told her of a change, but the relation of its cause, the
naming to her startled ear of the mystery of "the dog by day, and the
man by night," was reserved for a being, who was to prepare the world
for the reception of the mighty numbers which were to be the progeny of
its mother.

She had wandered forth to a lonely valley--lonely where all was
lonely--to weep and sigh over her lost peace, and to think of the dear
being with which that loss seemed to her to be in some way connected,
when suddenly the sky became darkened, and she saw the form of a being
shaped like that which visited her in her sleep, but of immense
proportions, coming towards her from the east. The clouds wreathed
themselves around his head, his hair swept the mists from the
mountain-tops, his eyes were larger than the rising sun when he wears
the red flush of anger in the Frog-Moon, and his voice, when he gave it
full tone, was louder than the thunder of the Spirit's Bay of Lake
Huron. But to the woman he spoke in soft whispers; his terrific accents
were reserved for the dog, who quailed beneath them in evident terror,
not daring even to utter his only words, "bow, wow." The mother of the
world