dents or little inventions of fancy, and became longer and larger as
they passed from one story-teller to another and were retold generation
after generation.

Men love stories, and for very good reasons, as has been pointed out in
introductions to other volumes in this series; and the more quick and
original the imagination of a race, the more interesting and varied will
be its stories. From the earliest times, long before books were made,
the people of many countries were eagerly listening to the men and women
who could tell thrilling or humorous tales, as in these later days they
read the novels of the writers who know how to tell a story so as to
stir the imagination or hold the attention and make readers forget
themselves and their worries and troubles. In India and Japan, in Russia
and Roumania, among the Indians at the foot of the Rocky Mountains,
these stories are still told, not only to children by their mothers and
grandmothers, but to crowds of grown-up people by those who have the art
of making tales entertaining; and there are still so many of these
stories floating about the world from one person to another that if they
were written down they would fill a great library. "Until the generation
now lately passed away," says Mr. Gosse in his introduction to that very
interesting book, "Folk and Fairy Tales" by Asbjoernsen, "almost the only
mode in which the Norwegian peasant killed time in the leisure moments
between his daily labour and his religious observances, was in listening
to stories. It was the business of old men and women who had reached the
extreme limit of their working hours, to retain and repeat these ancient
legends in prose and verse, and to recite or sing them when called to do
so." And Miss Hapgood has told us that in Russia these stories have not
only been handed down wholly by word or mouth for a thousand years, but
are flourishing to-day and extending into fresh fields.

The stories made by the people, and told before evening fires, or in
public places and at the gates of inns in the Orient, belong to the ages
when books were few and knowledge limited, or to people whose fancy was
not hampered by familiarity with or care for facts; they are the
creations, as they were the amusement, of men and women who were
children in knowledge, but were thinking deeply and often wisely of what
life meant to them, and were eager to know and hear more about
themselves, their fellows, and the world. In th