listen to, would have been unachieved. This book is meant to be read
aloud, and not merely taken in by the eye.

In a few instances I have introduced or changed an incident. I have
never done so, however, without mentioning the fact in the Notes.
These have been relegated to the obscurity of small print and a back
place, while the little ones have been, perhaps unnecessarily, warned
off them. They indicate my sources and give a few references to
parallels and variants which may be of interest to fellow-students of
Folk-lore. It is, perhaps, not necessary to inform readers who are not
fellow-students that the study of Folk-tales has pretensions to be a
science. It has its special terminology, and its own methods of
investigation, by which it is hoped, one of these days, to gain fuller
knowledge of the workings of the popular mind as well as traces of
archaic modes of thought and custom. I hope on some future occasion to
treat the subject of the English Folk-tale on a larger scale and with
all the necessary paraphernalia of prolegomena and excursus. I shall
then, of course, reproduce my originals with literal accuracy, and
have therefore felt the more at liberty on the present occasion to
make the necessary deviations from this in order to make the tales
readable for children.

Finally, I have to thank those by whose kindness in waiving their
rights to some of these stories, I have been enabled to compile this
book. My friends Mr. E. Clodd, Mr. F. Hindes Groome, and Mr. Andrew
Lang, have thus yielded up to me some of the most attractive stories
in the following pages. The Councils of the English and of the
American Folk-lore Societies, and Messrs. Longmans, have also been
equally generous. Nor can I close these remarks without a word of
thanks and praise to the artistic skill with which my friend, Mr. J.