the Ark, on wet days. Hector's little boy may
have heard them in Troy Town, for it is certain that Homer knew them,
and that some of them were written down in Egypt about the time of
Moses.

People in different countries tell them differently, but they are
always the same stories, really, whether among little Zulus, at the
Cape, or little Eskimo, near the North Pole. The changes are only in
matters of manners and customs; such as wearing clothes or not, meeting
lions who talk in the warm countries, or talking bears in the cold
countries. There are plenty of kings and queens in the fairy tales,
just because long ago there were plenty of kings in the country. A
gentleman who would be a squire now was a kind of king in Scotland in
very old times, and the same in other places. These old stories, never
forgotten, were taken down in writing in different ages, but mostly in
this century, in all sorts of languages. These ancient stories are the
contents of the Fairy books.

Now "The Arabian Nights," some of which, but not nearly all, are given
in this volume, are only fairy tales of the East. The people of Asia,
Arabia, and Persia told them in their own way, not for children, but
for grown-up people. There were no novels then, nor any printed books,
of course; but there were people whose profession it was to amuse men
and women by telling tales. They dressed the fairy stories up, and
made the characters good Mahommedans, living in Bagdad or India. The
events were often supposed to happen in the reign of the great Caliph,
or ruler of the Faithful, Haroun al Raschid, who lived in Bagdad in
786-808 A.D. The vizir who accompanies the Caliph was also a real
person of the great family of the Barmecides. He was put to death by
the Caliph in a very cruel way, nobody ever knew why. The stories must
have been told in their present shape a good long while after the
Caliph died, when nobody knew very exactly what had really happened.
At last some storyteller thought of writing down the tales, and fixing
them into a kind of framework, as if they had all been narrated to a
cruel Sultan by his wife. Probably the tales were written down about
the time when Edward I. was fighting Robert Bruce. But changes were
made in them at different times, and a great deal that is very dull and
stupid was put in, and plenty of verses. Neither the verses nor the
dull pieces are given in this book.

People in France and England knew almost no