selection of words so as to make the story vivid and interesting.

The folk-tales were not written out; many of them grew out of single
incidents 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 Asbjörnsen, "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