urch path to hinder
people from attending Sunday mass, and the woman because she made butter
on Sunday. This man carries two bundles of thorns, and the woman her
butter-tub, for ever. In Swabia they say there is a mannikin in the
moon, who stole wood; and in Frisia they say it is a man, who stole
cabbages. The Scandinavian legend is that the moon and sun are brother
and sister--the moon in this case being the male. The story goes that
Mani, the moon, took up two children from earth, named Bil and Hjuki, as
they were carrying a pitcher of water from the well Brygir, and in this
myth Mr. Baring-Gould discovers the origin of the nursery rhyme of Jack
and Jill. 'These children,' he says, 'are the moon-spots, and the fall
of Jack, and the subsequent fall of Jill, simply represent the vanishing
of one moon-spot after another as the moon wanes.'

In Britain there are references in the ancient monkish writings to a man
in the moon; and in the Record Office there is an impression of a seal
of the fourteenth century bearing the device of a man carrying a bundle
of thorns in the moon. The legend attached is, 'Te Waltere docebo cur
spinas phebo gero' ('I will teach thee, Walter, why I carry thorns to
the moon'), which Mr. Hudson Taylor, who describes the seal, thinks to
be an enigmatical way of saying that honesty is the best policy--the
thorns having evidently been stolen.

Chaucer has more than one reference to the man in the moon, and so have
most of the older poets. Shakespeare not only refers frequently to 'a'
man, but in the Midsummer Night's Dream Peter Quince distinctly
stipulates that the man who is to play 'the moon' shall carry 'a bush of
thorns.'

The man in the moon, according to Dante, is Cain, carrying a bundle of
thorns, and yet in that planet he found located only those comparatively
mild sinners who had partly neglected their vows. A French legend, on
the other hand, identifies 'the man' with Judas Iscariot. _Per contra_,
in India the Buddhist legend places a hare in the moon, carried there by
Indra for kindly service rendered to him on earth.

May not this hare of the Indian mythology be the moon-dog of some of our
own legends? Peter Quince, we know, recommended that the moon should
have a dog as well as a bundle of sticks, and the association of the
quadruped in the story is very common. The North American Indians
believe that the moon is inhabited by a man and a dog. The Maoris
believe in the man, but not i