ppears in a
red dress.

The moon is also a woman, and not particularly chaste.
She stays a long time with the men, and from the
effects of her intercourse with them, she becomes very
thin and wastes away to a mere skeleton. When in this
state, Nurrunduri orders her to be driven away. She
flies, and is secreted for some time, but is employed
all the time in seeking roots which are so nourishing
that in a short time she appears again, and fills out
and becomes fat rapidly.

Here we see how even such sublime and poetic phenomena as sun and moon
are to the aboriginal mind only symbols of their coarse, sensual
lives: the heavenly bodies are concubines of the men, welcomed when
fat, driven away when thin. That puts the substance of Australian love
in a nutshell.

BARRINGTON'S LOVE-STORY

In the absence of aboriginal love-stories let us amuse ourselves by
examining critically a few more of the alleged cases of romantic love
discovered by Europeans. The erudite German anthropologist Gerland
expresses his belief (VI., 755) that notwithstanding the degradation
of the Australians "cases of true romantic love occur among them," and
he refers for an instance to Barrington (I., 37). On consulting
Barrington I find the following incident related as a sample of
"genuine love in all its purity." I condense the unessential parts:

A young man of twenty-three, belonging to a tribe near
Paramatta, was living in a cave with two sisters, one
of fourteen, the other of twenty. One day when he
returned from his kangaroo hunt he could not find the
girls. Thinking they had gone to fetch water or roots
for supper, he sat down till a rain-storm drove him
into the cave, where he stumbled over the prostrate
form of the younger sister. She was lying in a pool of
blood, but presently regained consciousness and told
him that a man had come to carry off her sister, after
beating her on the head. She had seized the sister's
arm to hold her back when the brute knocked her over
with his club and dragged off the sister.

It was too late to take revenge that day, but next
morning the two set out for the tribe to which the
girl-robber belonged. As they approached the camp,
Barrington continues, "he saw the sister of the very
savage who had stolen his sister; she was leaving her
tribe to pick some sticks