From the INTRODUCTION. IT is only within the last few years that the importance of folk-lore, the popular legends, tales, drolls, and extravagances which have been handed down from generation to generation among the labourers, peasants and youth of a nation, has been frankly recognised. It is now, however, gene- rally acknowledged that this kind of literature, which more than all other deserves the name of popular, possesses a value beyond any momentary amusement which the tales themselves may afford, and it has assumed an honourable post side by side with other and graver materials, and has obtained a recognised use in deciding the conclusions of the historian and ethnologist. It is fortunate that the utility of these 'tales and old wives' fables' should have been thus recognised, otherwise the dull utilitarianism of modern educators would soon have trampled out these fragments of the 'elder time,' and have left to our children no alternative than that of 'being crammed with geography and natural history.'* The collection of Serbian popular tales, now translated into English and here published, is an additional contribution to our knowledge of such literature—the most venerable secular literature, it may be, which has come down to our times. At the wish of the lady who has selected and translated these tales, I have undertaken to edit them. In doing so I have, however, preserved, as far as possible, the literality of her version, and have limited myself to the addition of a few notes to the text and to occasional corrections of style, rendered necessary by the translator's habit of thinking and writing in another language. The tales included in this volume have been selected from two collections of Serbian folk-lore; the greater part from the well-known 'Srpske narodne pripovijetke,' of Vuk Stefanovics Karadjich, published at Vienna, in 1853, and others from the 'Bosniacke narodne pripovijetke,' collected by the 'Society of Young Bosnia,' the first part of which collection was printed at Sissek, in Croatia, in 1870. The collection of Vuk Stefanovics Karadjich was translated into German by his daughter Wilhelmine, and printed at Berlin, in 1854. To this volume, which is dedicated to the Princess Julia, widow of the late Prince Michel Obrenovich III., Jacob Grimm, who suggested to Karadjich the utility of making the original collection, has contributed a short but interesting preface....