The Frithiof saga,[Footnote: Saga, an ancient Scandinavian legend, or mythical or historical tale.] as the story is called, did not appear in its present form until the fourteenth century, though it is believed to have existed, at least in part, in earlier ages. It has been told and retold by writers of Norway and Sweden, translated into many languages, and even made into a celebrated epic[Footnote: Epic, a narrative poem concerned usually with historic deeds and characters, and written in a style of marked dignity and grandeur.] poem by the Swedish poet, Tegner. Of course in the fourteenth century the people of northern Europe no longer thought that Odin, Balder and the other gods mentioned in the story lived in Valhalla and ruled the world. But at that time many did believe in magic and in the evil power of witches; and it is altogether probable that the wonderful ship Ellida, which possessed human intelligence and could save its master from shipwreck; the witches traveling about on the whale's back; the talking birds, and the magical ring and sword would have seemed far less astonishing to these people than would our great ocean steamships and men-of-war, our railroad trains and trolley cars, our telephones and talking-machines, and many other modern wonders in which we fully believe. While we agree with the children of the long-ago in admiring Frithiof's bravery and faithfulness and Ingeborg's amiability and constancy, probably we are most interested in the story because of the many adventures that it contains. How many of the bold deeds of Frithiof can you recall without turning to the story? If you can remember all of them you are surely doing well. Can you name these deeds in just the order in which you have read them? Suppose you tell this story some time when you are playing school with the younger children in the family or in the neighborhood. It would be a good thing for you to do just what a real teacher might do: go over the story, picking out all of the principal events and writing these briefly and clearly on a slip of paper, one under another, exactly in the order in which they occur. THE STORY OF SIEGFRIED Adapted by GRACE E. SELLON NOTE.--Near the beginning of the thirteenth century there was written in Germany one of the greatest story-poems in the literature of the world. This is the Nibelungenlied, a partly historical, partly mythical tale containing more than two thousand stanzas composed by an unknown poet, or perhaps by several poets. The first half of the poem is made up mostly of the deeds of Siegfried, a warrior king claimed as a national hero, not only by the Germans but by the Norse people, who lived in northern Europe, in the countries of Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. In the Norse stories, however, Siegfried is known as Sigurd.