ies for several months and received many more
contributions than it was possible to print, though they were featured
almost daily, writes Mr. Hardy:

"Paul Bunyan is, as your folklore sharks doubtless will inform you,
about the only true fable of this character we have in this country. I
do not attempt to dip into any of the real sub-surface studies of its
development, my experience with Paul having been severely practical. I
first heard of him in a soddy in North Dakota, where I was told of his
great logging operations when he stripped that country and removed the
stumps. In the mass of correspondence I received while handling the Paul
Bunyan yarns here, answers came from all corners of the globe and from
all classes of people."

Ida V. Turney, Department of Rhetoric, University of Oregon, and
President of the Oregon Council of English, has written a chapbook of
Paul Bunyan stories,--"gang-lore" Miss Turney classifies them, citing
technical reasons why they cannot be called "myth" "legend" or
"folk-lore."

"It is distinctly American" she writes, "No other country could possibly
produce a literary type just like it; for it is, at least so I think, a
symbolic expression of the forces of physical labor at work in the
development of a great country. The symbolism is, of course,
unconscious, but none the less accurate."

Miss Turney, the daughter of a lumberman, has known these stories from
childhood. "All Paul Bunyan stories start in a gang" she says, "others
are imitations ... Perhaps Paul Bunyan is the great American epic; but
if so it is _in the making_. In that case it seems to me that any gang
has a perfect right to create new stories.... Paul has become
astonishingly versatile in the West. He has tried his hand at almost
everything, just as the former laborers in the camps of Michigan and
Wisconsin branched into whatever big wild untamed hard work they came
across."

* * * * *

BABE, the big blue ox, constituted Paul Bunyan's assets and liabilities.
History disagrees as to when, where and how Paul first acquired this
bovine locomotive but his subsequent record is reliably established.
Babe could pull anything that had two ends to it.

[Illustration]

Babe was seven axehandles wide between the eyes according to some
authorities; others equally dependable say forty-two axehandles and a
plug of tobacco. Like other historical contradictions this comes from
using different standar