as encouraged me to follow it up with a sister volume of stories
selected from another Slavonic dialect extraordinarily rich in
folk-tales--I mean Ruthenian, the language of the Cossacks.

Ruthenian is a language intermediate between Russian and Polish, but
quite independent of both. Its territory embraces, roughly speaking,
that vast plain which lies between the Carpathians, the watershed of
the Dnieper, and the Sea of Azov, with Lemberg and Kiev for its chief
intellectual centres. Though it has been rigorously repressed by the
Russian Government, it is still spoken by more than twenty millions of
people. It possesses a noble literature, numerous folk-songs, not
inferior even to those of Serbia, and, what chiefly concerns us now, a
copious collection of justly admired folk-tales, many of them of great
antiquity, which are regarded, both in Russia and Poland, as quite
unique of their kind. Mr Ralston, I fancy, was the first to call the
attention of the West to these curious stories, though the want at
that time of a good Ruthenian dictionary (a want since supplied by the
excellent lexicon of Zhelekhovsky and Nidilsky) prevented him from
utilizing them. Another Slavonic scholar, Mr Morfill, has also
frequently alluded to them in terms of enthusiastic but by no means
extravagant praise.

The three chief collections of Ruthenian folk-lore are those of
Kulish, Rudchenko, and Dragomanov, which represent, at least
approximately, the three dialects into which Ruthenian is generally
divided. It is from these three collections that the present selection
has been made. Kulish, who has the merit of priority, was little more
than a pioneer, his contribution merely consisting of some dozen
_kazki_ (_Maerchen_) and _kazochiki_ (_Maerchenlein_), incorporated in
the second volume of his _Zapiski o yuzhnoi Rusi_ ("Descriptions of
South Russia," Petrograd, 1856-7). Twelve years later Rudchenko
published at Kiev what is still, on the whole, the best collection of
Ruthenian folk-tales, under the title of _Narodnuiya Yuzhnorusskiya
Skazki_ ("Popular South Russian Folk-tales"). Like Linnroet among the
Finns, Rudchenko took down the greater part of these tales direct from
the lips of the people. In a second volume, published in the following
year, he added other stories gleaned from various minor manuscript
collections of great rarity. In 1876 the Imperial Russian Geographical
Society published at Kiev, under the title of _Malorusskiya Narod