Every reader can feel the deep significance underlying the myths we
present--the poetry and imperishable beauty of the Greek, the strange
and powerful conceptions of the Scandinavian mind, the oddity and
fantasy of the Japanese, Slavs, and East Indians, and finally the
queer imaginings of our own American Indians. Who, for instance, could
ever forget poor Proserpina and the six pomegranate seeds, the death
of beautiful Baldur, the luminous Princess Labam, the stupid jellyfish
and shrewd monkey, and the funny way in which Hiawatha remade the
earth after it had been destroyed by flood?

Then take our legendary heroes: was ever a better or braver company
brought together--Perseus, Hercules, Siegfried, Roland, Galahad,
Robin Hood, and a dozen others? But stop, I am using too many
question-marks. There is no need to query heroes known and admired the
world over.

As true latter-day story-tellers, both Hawthorne and Kingsley retold
many of these myths and legends, and from their classic pages we have
adapted a number of our tales, and made them somewhat simpler and
shorter in form. By way of apology for this liberty (if some should
so consider it), we humbly offer a paragraph from a preface to the
"Wonder Book" written by its author:

"A great freedom of treatment was necessary but it will be observed
by every one who attempts to render these legends malleable in his
intellectual furnace, that they are marvelously independent of all
temporary modes and circumstances. They remain essentially the same,
after changes that would affect the identity of almost anything else."