Note 137.4 — Chapter XX · THE MEDUSA-WITCH IN SAGA AND SUPERSTITION.

Among savages, however, it hardly seems necessary for their fore-elders to render themselves obnoxious to superior beings as a cause of this transformation. The natives of North Australia have tales of persons, some good and others bad, who were turned on death into stones or trees.137.4 A Chinese legend, descending doubtless from a more barbarous period, explains the existence of three rocks in the Yang-tsze river and the Poyang lake, through which it runs. A boat containing a man, his wife and their two children was capsized on the river during a storm. The man and woman perished at once; but the lads were assisted by a compassionate frog, which took them on its back and made for their home on the banks of the lake. The younger boy, grieving at his parents’ death, threw himself off and was drowned, reappearing shortly after in the form of a bold limestone rock, now known as the Little Orphan, situate in the middle of the river about twenty miles below the egress of the lake. The surviving orphan held on until the frog had entered the lake, when he fell broken-hearted into the water and became the large rock, surmounted in later ages by a Buddhist monastery and pagoda, and called the Great Orphan. The frog, in the bitterness of grief at his unsuccessful efforts, also yielded up his life, and in due course emerged from the waves as the Frog Rock.138.1 In Japan the peasants discern high up on the weatherworn cliffs of Matsura, “the figure of a lady in long trailing court-dress with face and figure eagerly bent over the western waves.” It is Satyohimé, the wife of Saté-hiko, petrified while gazing to catch the last glimpse of the sails that bore her husband away to Corea, as one of the Mikado’s body-guard, sent to assist the Japanese allies at Hiaksai, in the year 536 A.D. Her sad fate has rendered her name the symbol in Japanese literature of devoted love.138.2