ar habit of taking out
their eyes when they do not wish to see things--a habit which has its
disadvantages, for sometimes they mislay their eyes and have to borrow a
pair from their neighbours. The rich, however, provide against such
accidents by always keeping a good stock of eyes on hand.

Lucian also discovered the reason of the red clouds which we on earth
often see at sunset. They are dyed by the immense quantity of blood
which is shed in the battles between the Moonfolk and the Sunfolk, who
are at constant feud.

The reason why the gentler sex are so fond of the moon is satirically
said to be because there is a man in it! But who and what is he? An old
writer, John Lilly, says: 'There liveth none under the sunne that knows
what to make of the man in the moone.' And yet many have tried.

One old ballad, for instance, says:

'The man in the moon drinks claret,
But he is a dull Jack-a-Dandy.
Would he know a sheep's head from a carrot,
He should learn to drink cyder and brandy'

--which may be interesting, but is certainly inconsequential. It is
curious, too, that while the moon is feminine in English, French, Latin
and Greek, it is masculine in German and cognate tongues. Now, if there
is a man in the moon, and if it be the case, as is asserted by
antiquarians, that the 'man in the moon' is one of the most ancient as
well as one of the most popular superstitions of the world, the
masculine is surely the right gender after all. Those who look to
Sanscrit for the solution of all mythological, as well as philological,
problems will confirm this, for in Sanscrit the moon is masculine. Dr.
Jamieson, of Scottish Dictionary fame, gets out of the difficulty by
saying that the moon was regarded as masculine in relation to the earth,
whose husband he was; but feminine in relation to the sun, whose wife
she was!

With the Greeks the moon was a female, Diana, who caught up her lover
Endymion; and Endymion was thus, probably, the first 'man in the moon.'
The Jews, again, have a tradition that Jacob is in the moon; and there
is the nursery story that the person in the moon is a man who was
condemned for gathering sticks on Sunday. This myth comes to us from
Germany--at all events, Mr. R. A. Proctor traced it there with much
circumstantiality. Mr. Baring-Gould, however, finds in some parts of
Germany a tradition that both a man and a woman are in the moon--the man
because he strewed brambles and thorns on the ch