On this account all nature seemed very mysterious to primitive man, and he therefore was ready to worship almost any object that caught his attention. Then the strange feeling he had that another spirit quite detached from his ordinary life lived inside his body, made him imagine queer things about this spirit; for one thing, that it might leave his body and go off on independent journeys in the form of a bird or an animal, or even that it might be stowed away for safe keeping in some animal or other object, like the famous story of the Norse giant whose heart, which is equivalent to his true life, is far away in an egg that is in a church that is on an island that lies in a lake. In many stories belonging to this primitive time, a man’s luck often stands for his life and is bound up in some object outside of himself as in this story of the Algonquin Indians, which reflects all the strange notions I have spoken of as well as giving an explanation of the appearance of the sheldrake duck. It is the story of how one of the Partridge’s wives became a sheldrake duck, and why her feet and feathers are red. “There was once a hunter who lived in the woods. He had a brother or spirit who was so small that he kept him in a box, and when he went forth he closed this very carefully, for fear lest an evil spirit should get him. “One day this hunter, returning, saw a very beautiful girl sitting on a rock by a river, making a moccasin. And being in a canoe he paddled up softly and silently to capture her; but she, seeing him coming, jumped into the water and disappeared. On returning to her mother, who lived at the bottom of the river, she was told to go back to the hunter and be his wife; ‘for now,’ said the mother, ‘you belong to that man.’ “The hunter’s name was Mitchihess, the Partridge. When she came to his lodge he was absent. So she arranged every thing for his return, making a bed of boughs. At night he came back with one beaver. This he divided; cooked one half for supper and laid by the other half. In the morning when she awoke he was gone, and the other half of the beaver had also disappeared. That night he returned with another beaver, and the same thing took place again. Then she resolved to spy and find out what all this meant. “So she lay down and went to sleep with one eye open. Then he quietly rose and cooked the half of the beaver, and taking a key unlocked a box, and took out a little red dwarf and fed him. Replacing the elf, he locked him up again, and lay down to sleep. And the small creature had eaten the whole half beaver. But ere he put him in his box he washed him and combed his hair, which seemed to delight him.