Stories from the Far East

Preface

Day after day, Time takes his flight down the stairway of the Past. Let us imagine that there are many of these stairways leading from one floor to another in this great house which we call Our World. Let us also imagine that each story of the house is a century high. What a string of stairways, ten of them, we should need to carry us back a thousand years! And yet if we run down the whole ten stairways and then down ten more, w r e shall not be far enough back in time to see and hear the man who first told the stories which we are about to read.

In that far distant past there were no printed books; so these stories were not read, but told — not once, but many times, by teacher to pupil and by father to son, until children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren, as they came climbing up the stairways, heard them told over and over again. And because so many boys and girls, youths and maidens, men and women, never became weary of hearing and of telling these stories, they must have been [ 3 ]

not only interesting, but full of value. The stories must also have been full of fun, full of action, or boys and girls would never have listened to them and remembered them as they did.

They must have been full of suggestive truth and hidden wisdom, or the old men would have said, “ Let’s stop telling them. They are fit only for children.” This is exactly what did not happen, for when century after century had come and gone, men still liked the stories well enough to write them on palm-leaves, or on paper, or on something else. In this way, many collections of these stories were made; and it is from three of these collections that our stories are taken. The arrangement of these collections is very peculiar: one story is placed within another, and a third within the second, and so on, until the whole is like a Chinese Ball Puzzle, with one inside the other.

In reading the stories about animals, it will help you to remember that,

The Jackal is very wise.

The Hare and the Mouse are clever, and so are, usually, the Deer, the Gazelle, and the Dog.

The Lion, the Tiger, the Elephant, the Ass, and the Monkey are usually stupid.

The Goose, the Swan, the Crow, and the Sandpiper are normally wise.

The Heron is stupid.

The Crab is clever, and so are the Fish and the

Snake, sometimes.

The Tortoise is stupid.

That these stories may interpret truth to boys and girls to-day as effectively as when they were told centuries ago in far-away Hindustan, is the hope and desire of those who have translated them from the Sanskrit and arranged them for you to read.