Myths and Legends of Our Own Land, vol 6 | Page 8

less kindly
than he thought to, and after a time he enlivened its monotony by
taking to wife a bright-eyed girl of his tribe. In four days she was dead.
The lesson was unheeded and he married again. Shortly after, he
stepped from his lodge one evening and never came back. The woods
were filled with a strange radiance on that night, and it is asserted that
Cloud Catcher was taken back to the lodge of the Sun and Moon, and is

now content to live in heaven.

THE COFFIN OF SNAKES
No one knew how it was that Lizon gained the love of Julienne, at
L'Anse Creuse (near Detroit), for she was a girl of sweet and pious
disposition, the daughter of a God-fearing farmer, while Lizon was a
dark, ill-favored wretch, who had come among the people nobody
knew whence, and lived on the profits of a tap-room where the vilest
liquor was sold, and where gaming, fighting, and carousing were of
nightly occurrence. Perhaps they were right in saying that it was
witchcraft. He impudently laid siege to her heart, and when she showed
signs of yielding he told her and her friends that he had no intention of
marrying her, because he did not believe in religion.
Yet Julienne deserted her comfortable home and went to live with this
disreputable scamp in his disreputable tavern, to the scandal of the
community, and especially of the priest, who found Lizon's power for
evil greater than his own for good, for as the tavern gained in hangers-
on the church lost worshippers. One Sunday morning Julienne
surprised the people by appearing in church and publicly asking pardon
for her wrong-doing. It was the first time she had appeared there since
her flight, and she was as one who had roused from a trance or
fever-sleep. Her father gladly took her home again, and all went well
until New- Year's eve, when the young men called d'Ignolee made the
rounds of the settlement to sing and beg meat for the poor--a custom
descended from the Druids. They came to the house of Julienne's father
and received his welcome and his goods, but their song was interrupted
by a cry of distress--Lizon was among the maskers, and Julienne was
gone. A crowd of villagers ran to the cabaret and rescued the girl from
the room into which the fellow had thrust her, but it was too late--she
had lost her reason. Cursing and striking and blaspheming, Lizon was
at last confronted by the priest, who told him he had gone too far; that
he had been a plague to the people and an enemy to the church. He then
pronounced against him the edict of excommunication, and told him
that even in his grave he should not rest; that the church, abandoned by
so many victims of his wiles and tyrannies, should be swept away.
The priest left the place forthwith, and the morals of the village fell
lower and lower. Everything was against it, too. Blight and storm and

insect pest ravaged the fields and orchards, as if nature had engaged to
make an expression of the iniquity of the place. Suddenly death came
upon Lizon. A pit was dug near his tavern and he was placed in a coffin,
but as the box was lowered it was felt to grow lighter, while there
poured from it a swarm of fat and filthy snakes. The fog that
overspread the earth that morning seemed to blow by in human forms,
the grave rolled like a wave after it had been covered, and after
darkness fell a blue will-o'-the-wisp danced over it. A storm set in,
heaping the billows on shore until the church was undermined, and
with a crash it fell into the seething flood. But the curse had passed, and
when a new chapel was built the old evils had deserted L'Anse Crease.

MACKINACK
Not only was Mackinack the birthplace of Hiawatha: it was the home
of God himself--Gitchi Manitou, or Mitchi Manitou--who placed there
an Indian Adam and Eve to watch and cultivate his gardens. He also
made the beaver, that his children might eat, and they acknowledged
his goodness in oblations. Bounteous sacrifices insured entrance after
death to the happy hunting-grounds beyond the Rocky Mountains.
Those who had failed in these offerings were compelled to wander
about the Great Lakes, shelterless, and watched by unsleeping giants
who were ten times the stature of mortals.
These giants still exist, but in the form of conical rocks, one of
which-called Sugar-Loaf, or Manitou's Wigwam--is ninety feet high. A
cave in this obelisk is pointed out as Manitou's abiding-place, and it
was believed that every other spire in the group had its wraith, whence
has come the name of the