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580 CEEATION.
more, when he happened to be eating celestial nuts, Pramzirnas
dropt a nutshell, and it lighted on the top of the highest moun
tain, to which beasts and several human pairs had fled for refuge.
They all climbed into the shell, and it drifted on the flood which
now covered all things. But God bent his countenance yet a
third time upon the earth, and he laid the storm, and made the
waters to abate. The men that Were saved dispersed themselves,
only one pair remained in that Lithuanians are descended.
country, and from them the
But they were now old, and they
grieved, whereupon God sent them for a comforter (linxmine)
the rainbow, who counselled them to leap over the earth s bones :
nine times they leapt, and nine couples sprang up, founders of
the nine tribes of Lithuania. This incident reminds us of the
origin of men from the stones cast by Deucalion and Pyrrha ; and
the rainbow, of the Bible account, except that here it is intro
duced as a person, instructing the couple what to do, as Hermes
(the divine messenger) did Deucalion. It were overbold perhaps
to connect the nutshell with that nut-tree (p. 572-3), by which
one vaguely expresses an unknown extraction.
Not all, even of the stories quoted, describe a universal deluge
desolating
the whole earth : that in which Deucalion was rescued
affected Greece alone, and of such accounts of partial floods
there are plenty. Philemon and Baucis in Phrygia (where Noah s
ark rested, p. 577), had given shelter to the wayfaring gods, and
being warned by them, fled up the mountain, and saw themselves
saved when the flood rose over the land (Ovid. Met. 8, 620) ;
they were changed into trees, as Askr and Embla were trees.
A Welsh folktale says, that in Brecknockshire, where a large
lake now lies, there once stood a great city. The king sent his
messenger to the sinful inhabitants, to prove them ; they heeded
not his words, and refused him a lodging. He stept into a
miserable hut, in which there only lay a child crying in its cradU
(conf. ludara, p. 559 n.) ; there he passed the night, and in going
away, dropt one of his gloves in the cradle. He had not left the
he thought of
city long, when he heard a noise and lamentation ;
turning back to look for his glove, but the town was no longer to
be seen, the waters covered the whole plain, but lo, in the midst
of the waves a cradle came floating, in which there lay both child
and glove. This child he took to the king, who had it reared as