Article March 7, 1914 Issue

The "Storm Fool"

MYRTLE B. S. JACKSON

Among the Indian legends, which have been forever crystallized in Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha," is the one which tells how Pau-Puk-Keewis, the "Storm Fool," found Hiawatha's wigwam unprotected one morning, and having done all the mischief he could in the house, went on to kill all the birds that fluttered round about the dwelling.

As it sometimes happens that we leave our mental dwelling-places unprotected, and the "Storm Fool" of error gets in, strangles our raven of wisdom and our birds of joy, and for the time being sets our home or our community in wild confusion, it may interest us to see how Hiawatha set to work to exterminate the enemy, and what experiences confronted him in his undertaking. The "Storm Fool," true to the nature of error, at once began to change forms. First he became a beaver, then a big fish, then a gigantic bird, lastly a serpent, but Hiawatha killed him in each of these forms, and finally, after many adventures, he is caught in his own natural shape, and rushes to the mountains for shelter, where the storm, the wind, the thunder, and the lightning rend the rocks, and they fall on him, and he is crushed in the ruins,—a very good picture of error falling into its own snare, and rushing to its own self-destruction.

The part of the story which particularly concerns us is the fact that not until Hiawatha had driven the error out of its different masks and shapes could he really get rid of it. As Mrs. Eddy has so adequately explained on page 209 of "Miscellaneous Writings," "Divine Love, as unconscious as incapable of error, pursues the evil that hideth itself, strips off its disguises, and—behold the result: evil, uncovered, is self-destroyed."

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