This material underwent a great alchemy in Melville’s imagination. He would not let his Moby Dick be mortal, but carried him unscathed through his adventures and at the end sent him off, victorious, shouldering the troubled waves with his ancient head. Nor would Melville allow the war against Moby Dick to be the plain war of the hunter and the hunted, but gave his hunter the excuse to chase the whale that the whale had chased him and had bitten off his leg. Nor would Melville allow the story to be conducted on the simple plane of mere adventure, but lifted it up into the regions of allegory and symbolism, added the fury of hot passions, drenched it with poetry and dark mystery, lighted it with irony and satire and comic vividness and vast laughter. It was his genius which made the story of Moby Dick important. Because it is important, the neglected story of Mocha Dick deserves at least its little moment. FOLK-LORE IN KENTUCKY The first and second members of the firm of Mencken, Nathan, and God must have shouted for joy when they first opened—as doubtless they have opened—the compilation lately made of nearly four thousand “Kentucky Superstitions,” in the volume of that name. _The American Credo_ had only about an eighth as many vulgar errors, for all its satiric malice. And satiric malice can find nothing in the national mind more primitive than some of the beliefs here set forth. For instance: “To cure a child of thrush, let a stallion snort into the child’s face”; “Gunpowder is given to women to facilitate childbirth”; “Catch a toad, put it under a rock, and let it starve to death. After it has dried thoroughly, beat it into a powder, and sprinkle this powder on the person whom you wish to fall in love with you.” Doctrines like these recall medieval medicine, aboriginal witchcraft, the jungle, and the cave. And yet side by side with them are recent absurdities as new as the news: “Billikins bring good luck”; “It is well for an aviator to wear a lady’s stocking around his neck”; “It brings bad luck for the last of three people to use a lighted match in smoking.” The idol has become a Billikin, and the knight wearing his lady’s favour has taken to the air, but these are superficial accidents. Otherwise it looks as if the folk changes not much more rapidly than mountains grow.