The story-teller who roars with the lion and bleats with the lamb
is sure to be rewarded with shouts of enthusiastic delight from
the audience.




THE ARABIAN NIGHTS


_All nations have their fairy tales, but India seems to have
been the country from which they all started, carried on their
travels by the professional story-tellers who kept the tales alive
throughout Asia. In Bagdad and Cairo to-day, that cafe never lacks
customers where the blind storyteller relates to the spell-bound
Arabs some chapter from the immortal Arabian Nights, the King of
all Wonder Books.

No one knows where the tales were written, except that they came
out of the Far East, India, Arabia and Persia. Haroun Al Raschid,
who was called The Just, was a real Eastern monarch who lived in
Bagdad over eleven hundred years ago, about the same time that
Charlemagne was King of France. We can believe that the tales are
very old, but the most we know is that they were translated from
Arabic into French in 1704-17 by a Frenchman named Galland, and
that the manuscript of his translation is preserved in the French
National Library. American boys first had the chance to read the
notes in English about the time President Monroe was elected._