The language in which these stories are presented is the language
in which they were collected and written down,--English. Perhaps
no apology is required for not printing the vernacular herewith;
nevertheless an explanation might be made. In the first place,
the object in recording these tales has been a literary one, not a
linguistic one. In the second place, the number of distinctly different
languages represented by the originals might be baffling even to the
reader interested in linguistics, especially as our method of approach
has been from the point of view of cycles of stories, and not from the
point of view of the separate tribes telling them. In the third place,
the form of prose tales among the Filipinos is not stereotyped; and
there is likely to be no less variation between two Visayan versions
of the same story, or between a Tagalog and a Visayan, than between
the native form and the English rendering. Clearly Spanish would not
be a better medium than English: for to-day there is more English than
Spanish spoken in the Islands; besides, Spanish never penetrated into
the very lives of the peasants, as English penetrates to-day by way
of the school-house. I have endeavored to offset the disadvantages
of the foreign medium by judicious and painstaking directions to my
informants in the writing-down of the tales. Only in very rare cases
was there any modification of the original version by the teller,
as a concession to Occidental standards. Whatever substitutions I
have been able to detect I have removed. In practically every case,
not only to show that these are bona fide native stories, but also
to indicate their geographical distribution, I have given the name
of the narrator, his native town, and his province. In many cases I
have given, in addition, the source of his information. I am firmly
convinced that all the tales recorded here represent genuine Filipino
tradition so far as the narrators are concerned, and that nothing