however, a considerable volume of unwritten literature in the world
in the form of stories, songs, proverbs, and pithy phrases; a
literature handed down in large part from earlier times, but still
receiving additions from contemporary men and women.

This unwritten literature is to be found, it is hardly necessary to
say, almost exclusively among country people remote from towns, and
whose mental attitude and community feeling reproduce, in a way, the
conditions under which the English and Scotch ballads were originally
composed. The Roumanian peasants sing their songs upon every
occasion of domestic or local interest; and sowing and harvesting,
birth, christening, marriage, the burial, these notable events in
the life of the country side are all celebrated by unknown poets;
or, rather, by improvisers who give definite form to sentiments,
phrases, and words which are on many lips. The Russian peasant
tells his stories as they were told to him; those heroic epics whose
life is believed, in some cases, to date back at least a thousand
years. These great popular stories form a kind of sacred
inheritance bequeathed by one generation to another as a possession
of the memory, and are almost entirely unrelated to the written
literature of the country. Miss Hapgood tells a very interesting
story of a government official, stationed on the western shore of
Lake Onega, who became so absorbed in the search for this
literature of the people that he followed singers and reciters from
place to place, eager to learn from their lips the most widely known
of these folk tales. On such an expedition of discovery he found
himself, one stormy night, on an island in the lake. The hut of
refuge was already full of stormbound peasants when he entered.
Having made himself some tea, and spread his blanket in a vacant
place, he fell asleep. He was presently awakened by a murmur of