and knees if they can. They find the bankivas gathered in
a little ring, spreading their tails and wings, dancing and singing
in harmony, the head bird setting the air. When the children have
gathered, they, too, begin to dance and sing, following the birds
as they go deeper and deeper into the wood. Night falls, and with a
harsh cry the bankivas fly away in all directions. The children are
as if awakened from a sleep. They do not know where they are, and
cannot tell which way to turn. Jungles and swamps are about them,
man-eating crocodiles are watching from the water, poisonous and
strangling snakes are gliding about the brush, the pythons that loop
themselves from overhanging limbs are sometimes thrice the length of
a man. Dread and danger are on every hand. And at home the mothers
sit crying. Sometimes, though rarely, a man or woman totters back
to a village bearing marks of great age, and is sure that he or she
left there only the night before. These wanderers do not know where
they have been. They remember only that the bankiva sang sweetly, and
they followed it, as the children of Hamelin followed the pied piper.

The Crab Tried to Eat the Moon

Among the fantastic stories told of snakes, water-buffalo, birds,
and sharks are several that have obvious meaning. The crab figures in
certain of these tales as the cause of the tides. He was an enormous
creature and lived in a great hole in the bottom of a distant sea,
whence he crawled twice a day, the water pouring into the hollow then,
and leaving low water on the coast. When he settled back again the
water was forced out and the tide was high. The relation of tides to
the moon may have introduced this creature in another aspect as the
moon's enemy and cause of her eclipse, for it is related that one
evening a Filipino princess walking on a beach saw with astonishment
an island that had never been visible on the sea before. Her emotion
was that of alarm when she saw the island approach the shore, and
she hid in the shrubbery to watch. Presently she could make out,
despite the failing light, that it was no island, but a crab larger
than a hundred buffalo. Its goggling eyes were dreadful to see, its
mouth was opening fiercely, its claws working as if eager to clutch
its prey. The moon arose at the full, making a track of light across
the heaving waters, and the crab, facing east, prepared to spring and
drag it to its den beneath the ocean. Half a mile away t