Each legend has its variants, but in every instance I have
retained that particular version which seemed to me to be the
most characteristic, and have given it without embellishment and
without exaggeration.

The dialect, it will be observed, is wholly different from that
of the Hon. Pompey Smash and his literary descendants, and
different also from the intolerable misrepresentations of the
minstrel stage, but it is at least phonetically genuine.
Nevertheless, if the language of Uncle Remus fails to give vivid
hints of the really poetic imagination of the negro; if it fails
to embody the quaint and homely humor which was his most
prominent characteristic; if it does not suggest a certain
picturesque sensitiveness--a curious exaltation of mind and
temperament not to be defined by words--then I have reproduced
the form of the dialect merely, and not the essence, and my
attempt may be accounted a failure. At any rate, I trust I have
been successful in presenting what must be, at least to a large
portion of American readers, a new and by no means unattractive
phase of negro character--a phase which may be considered a
curiously sympathetic supplement to Mrs. Stowe's wonderful
defense of slavery as it existed in the South. Mrs. Stowe, let me
hasten to say, attacked the possibilities of slavery with all the
eloquence of genius; but the same genius painted the portrait of
the Southern slave-owner, and defended him.

A number of the plantation legends originally appeared in the
columns of a daily newspaper--The Atlanta Constitution and in
that shape they attracted the attention of various gentlemen who
were kind enough to suggest that they would prove to be valuable