he requested an Indian to gather and bring in all the
arrow-points he could find, the Indian declared them to be "no good," that
they had been made by the lizards. Whereupon Mr. Frost drew from him the
following lizard-story. "There was a time when the lizards were little
men, and the arrow-points which are now found were shot by them at the
grizzly bear. The bears could talk then, and would eat the little men
whenever they could catch them. The arrows of the little men were so small
that they would not kill the bears when shot into them, and only served to
enrage them." The Indian could not tell how the little men became
transformed into lizards.[A] Again, the Shoshones of California dread
their infants being changed by Ninumbees or dwarfs.[B]

[Footnote A: _Folk Lore Journal_, vii. 24.]

[Footnote B: Hartland, _ut supra_, p. 351.]

Finally, every one has read about the Pukwudjies, "the envious little
people, the fairies, the pigmies," in the pages of Longfellow's
"Hiawatha."[A] It ought to be mentioned that Mr. Leland states that the
red-capped, scanty-shirted elf of the Algonquins was obtained from the
Norsemen; but if, as he says, the idea of little people has sunk so deeply
into the Indian mind, it cannot in any large measure have been derived
from this source.[B]

[Footnote A: xviii.]

[Footnote B: _Etrusco Roman Remains_, p. 162.]

(7.) The stunted races whom Mr. MacRitchie considers to have formed the
subjects of the fairy legend have themselves tales of little people. This
is true especially of the Eskimo, as will have been already noticed, a
fact to which my attention was called by Mr. Hartland.

For the reasons just enumerated, I am unable to accept Mr. MacRitchie's
theory as a complete explanation of the fairy question, but I am far from
desirous of under-estimating the value and significance of his work. Mr.
Tylor, as I have already mentioned, states, in a sentence which may yet
serve as a motto for a work on the whole question of the origin of the
fairy myth, that "various different facts have given rise to stories of
giants and dwarfs, more than one mythic element perhaps combining to form
a single legend--a result perplexing in the extreme to the mythological
interpreter."[A] And I think it may be granted that Mr. MacRitchie has
gone far to show that one of these mythic elements, one strand in the
twisted cord of fairy mythology, is the half-forgotten memory of skulking
aborigines, or, as Mr. Nutt