The Greeks fabled Eos, the dawn-goddess, to have been so disconsolate at the death of Memnon, her son, that she wept for him every morning, and her tears are the dewdrops found upon the earth. In the mythology of the Samoans of the Pacific, the Heaven-god, father of all things, and the Earth-goddess, mother of all things, once held each other in firm embrace, but were separated in the long ago. Heaven, however, retains his love for earth, and, mourning for her through the long nights, he drops many tears upon her bosom,--these, men call dewdrops. The natives of Tahiti have a like explanation for the thick-falling rain-drops that dimple the surface of the ocean, heralding an approaching storm,--they are tears of the heaven-god. The saying is:-- "Thickly falls the small rain on the face of the sea, They are not drops of rain, but they are tears of Oro." (Tylor, Early Hist. of Mankind, p. 334.) An Indian tribe of California believe that "the rain is the falling tears of Indians sick in heaven," and they say that it was "the tears of all mankind, weeping for the loss of a good young Indian," that caused the deluge, in which all were drowned save a single couple (440. 488). Oriental legend relates, that, in his utter loneliness after the expulsion from Paradise, "Adam shed such an abundance of tears that all beasts and birds satisfied their thirst therewith; but some of them sunk into the earth, and, as they still contained some of the juices of his food in Paradise, produced the most fragrant trees and spices." We are further told that "the tears flowed at last in such torrents from Adam's eyes, that those of his right started the Euphrates, while those of his left set the Tigris in motion" (547. 34). These are some of the answers of the folk to the question of Shakespeare:-- "What's the matter, That this distempered messenger of wet, The many-coloured Iris, rounds thine eye?" And many more are there that run along the lines of Scott's epigrammatic summation:-- "A child will weep a bramble's smart, A maid to see her sparrow part, A stripling for a woman's heart: But woe betide a country, when She sees the tears of bearded men." _Cradles._ According to Mr. Powers: "The conspicuous painstaking which the Modok squaw expends upon her baby-basket is an index of her maternal love. And indeed the Modok are strongly attached to their offspring,--a fact abundantly attested by many sad and mournful spectacles witnessed in the closing scenes of the war of 1873. On the other hand, a California squaw often carelessly sets her baby in a deep, conical basket, the same in which she carries her household effects, leaving him loose and liable to fall out. If she makes a baby-basket, it is totally devoid of ornament; and one tribe, the Miwok, contemptuously call it 'the dog's nest.' It is among Indians like these that we hear of infanticide" (519. 257).