It is only within the last few years that the importance of folk-lore, the popular legends, tales, drolls, andextravagances 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, generally 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.'