girl
from County Roscommon if she could tell me any stories about fairies. "Do
ye give in to fairies then, ma'am?" she joyously asked, adding, "A good
many folks don't give in to them" (believe in them, _i.e._, the fairies).
Apparently she was heartily glad to meet some one who spoke her own
language. From that hour she was ever ready to tell me tales or recall
old sayings and beliefs about the doings and powers of the "good people"
of old Ireland.

A stewardess, properly approached, can communicate a deal of lore in her
leisure hours during a three or four days' ocean trip. Oftentimes a
caller has by chance let drop a morsel that was quickly picked up and
preserved.

The large amount of botanical and zooelogical mythology that has gradually
accumulated in my hands is reserved for separate treatment. Now and then
some individual item of the sort appears in the following pages, but only
for some special reason. A considerable proportion of my general
folk-lore was orally collected from persons of foreign birth. There were
among these more Irish than of any other one nationality, but Scotch and
English were somewhat fully represented, and Scandinavians (including one
Icelander), Italians, a Syrian, a Parsee, and several Japanese
contributed to the collection.

It has been a puzzling question to decide just where to draw the line in
separating foreign from what we may call current American folk-lore. The
traditions and superstitions that a mother as a child or girl heard in a
foreign land, she tells her children born here, and the lore becomes, as
it were, naturalized, though sometimes but little modified from the form
in which it was current where the mother originally heard it. Whether to
include any folk-lore collected from oral narrators or from
correspondents, even if it had been very recently brought hither, was the
question. At length it has been decided to print only items taken down
from the narration of persons born in America, though frequent parallels
and numberless variants have been obtained from persons now resident
here, though reared in other countries.

It would be a most interesting task to collate the material embraced in
the present collection with the few published lists of American
superstitions, customs, and beliefs, and with the many dialect and other
stories, the books of travel, local histories, and similar sources of
information in regard to our own folk-lore. Equally valuable would be the