ether the work in hand be the smiting of a
rock or the crushing of a butterfly, he swings high overhead the Hammer of
Thor. Compare, for example, the French and the Caucasian methods of
expressing the fact that the consequences of bad advice fall on the
advised and not on the adviser. The Frenchman is satisfied to simply state
the obvious truism that advisers are not payers, but the mountaineer, with
forcible and graphic imagery, declares that "He who instructs how to jump
does not tear his mouth, but he who jumps breaks his legs." Again: the
German has in his proverbial storehouse no more vivid illustration of the
wilfulness of luck than the saying that "A lucky man's hens lay eggs with
double yolks;" but this is altogether too common and natural a phenomenon
to satisfy the mountaineer's conception of the power of luck; so he coolly
knocks the subject flat with the audacious hyperbole, "A lucky man's horse
and mare both have colts." Fortune and misfortune present themselves to
the German mind as two buckets in a well; but to the Caucasian mountaineer
"Fortune is like a cock's tail on a windy day" (_i.e.,_ first on one side
and then on the other). The Danes assert guardedly that "He loses least in
a quarrel who controls his tongue;" but the mountaineer cries out boldly
and emphatically, "Hold your tongue and you will save your head;" and in
order that the warning may not be forgotten, he inserts it as a sort of
proverbial chorus at the end of every paragraph in his oldest code of
written law. It is not often that a proverb rises to such dignity and
importance as to become part of the legal literature of a country; and the
fact that this proverb should have been chosen from a thousand others, and
repeated twenty or thirty times in a brief code of criminal law, is very
significant of the character of the people.

Caucasian proverbs rarely deal with verbal abstractions, personified
virtues or vague intellectual generalizations. They present their ideas in
hard, sharp-edged crystals rather than in weak verbal solutions, and
their similes, metaphors and analogies are as distinct, clear-cut and
tangible as it is possible to make them. The German proverb, "He who
grasps too much lets much fall," would die a natural death in the Caucasus
in a week, because it defies what Tyndall calls "mental presentation:" it
is not pictorial enough; but let its spirit take on a Caucasian body,
introduce it to the world as "You can't hold two wa