one thing is some other proof than a mere argument from analogy.

The same proof is wanting for those who would argue that the story of
Red Riding Hood is only another dawn-myth. Mr. Hussin holds this view,
but is not the story of the Cat and the Well capable of the same kind of
reading? Pussy is the earth; Tommy, who shoves her into the well, is the
evening or twilight; the well is Night; Johnny Stout is the Dawn who
pulls the earth out of darkness again. There is no limit to this kind of
application of so elastic a theory. But the very ease with which such
explanations can be attached to any nursery-rhyme or folk-tale should
warn us against their probability. As Mr. Tylor says: 'Rash inferences
which, on the strength of mere resemblances, derive episodes of myth
from episodes of nature, must be regarded with utter distrust, for the
student who has no more stringent criterion than this for his myths of
sun, and sky, and dawn, will find them wherever it pleases him to seek
them.'

The mention of the story of Red Riding Hood suggests a familiar
folk-tale, upon which that of Red Riding Hood may or may not have been
founded, but which certainly forms the basis of a good many similar
tales, and has been the subject of a good deal of wise exposition by the
mythologists. In the story of the Wolf and the Seven Little Kids, as
told by Grimm, there is a goat who goes out one day, leaving her seven
little ones safely locked in the house, after warning them to beware of
the wolf, whom she describes. The wolf comes begging for entrance,
pretending to be their mother, but they distrust first his voice and
then his black paws. He gets his paws whitened and comes back, showing
them against the window as proof that he is indeed their mother.
Therefore they open the door, and he swallows six of them, one after the
other, without going through the ceremony of mastication. After this he
goes back to the wood and falls asleep under a tree, where the
disconsolate mother finds him. With the assistance of the seventh and
youngest kid, who had escaped by hiding herself in the clock-case, the
wolf is cut open, and the six kids jump out all alive and kicking.
Stones are then placed in the wolf's stomach, and it is sewed up. When
the wolf wakens he cannot account for the jumbling and tumbling in his
stomach, so he goes to the well to get a drink. But the weight of the
stones makes him top-heavy; he falls in and is drowned.

Now, there is noth