THE JINNEE AND THE MERCHANT A VIGNETTE WOODCUT BY WILLIAM HARVEY IN THE FIRST EDITION OF LANE'S TRANSLATION WHICH STILL REMAINS THE BEST ENGLISH VERSION OF THE "ARABIAN NIGHTS"] The usual editions of _The Arabian Nights_, contain eight stories. Happy are the children who have had these immortal stories told or read to them in their impressionable early years. Like the great stories of the Bible are these fairy tales of magicians, genii, enchanted carpets and flying horses; of princesses that wed poor boys who have been given the power to summon the wealth of the underworld; of the adventures of Sinbad in many waters, and of his exploits, which were more remarkable than those of Ulysses. The real democracy of the Orient is brought out in these tales, for the Grand Vizier may have been the poor boy of yesterday and the young adventurer with brains and cunning and courage often wins the princess born to the purple. All the features of Moslem life, which have not changed for fourteen hundred years, are here reproduced and form a very attractive study. For age or childhood _The Arabian Nights_ will always have a perennial charm, because these tales appeal to the imagination that remains forever young. The great poem of German literature, _The Nibelungenlied_, may be bracketed with _The Arabian Nights_, for it expresses perfectly the ideals of the ancient Germans, the historic myths that are common to all Teutonic and Scandinavian races, and the manners and customs that marked the forefathers of the present nation of "blood and iron." _The Nibelungenlied_ has well been called the German _Iliad_, and it is worthy of this appellation, for it is the story of a great crime and a still greater retribution. It is really the story of Siegfried, King of the Nibelungs, in lower Germany, favored of the Gods, who fell in love with Kriemhild, Princess of the Burgundians; of Siegfried's help by which King Gunther, brother of Kriemhild, secures as his wife the Princess Brunhilde of Iceland; of the rage and humiliation of Brunhilde when she discovers that she has been subdued by Siegfried instead of by her own overlord; of Brunhilde's revenge, which took the form of the treacherous slaying of Siegfried by Prince Hagen, and of the tremendous revenge of Kriemhild years after, when, as the wife of King Etzel of the Huns, she sees the flower of the Burgundian chivalry put to the sword, and she slays with her own hand both her brother Gunther and Hagen, the murderer of Siegfried.