Here you will find two legends that come from Shakespeare’s land, legends that must have been well known to that great lover and teller of old tales. And in the legend of Herne the Hunter you will recognise a story which Shakespeare himself told in “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” And it was probably an old tale when he repeated it. In “King Arthur’s Camelot” you meet with a very old legend of that great hero of British historical romance; and in the story of “Wayland Smith” you get an echo of the lore of the old Pagan gods which invading Anglo-Saxon tribes brought to England soon after the Romans left it. Manners and customs change; the old creeds die as the new ones arise, yet--and it is very wonderful to realize it--some of the old stories have survived every phase of the passing centuries’ intolerance of the past, and are told to-day in a form not so very different from that in which they were first narrated by our semi-savage ancestors, over their camp fires in the heart of primeval English forests. But civilization is “improving” away romance very rapidly. And it is worth while to hang on fast to the last remaining shreds of those other days when life, though ruder, had more time for simple dreams of wonderful things. LYONESSE [Illustration: Haggard witch viewing some knights approaching.] THE WHISPERING KNIGHTS. High up on an outlying spur of the Cotswold hills, where Warwickshire and Oxfordshire meet, there is a sort of miniature Stonehenge, known as the Rollright Stones; and the Story they tell about them is that they were once a king and his courtiers who, by evil spells, were changed suddenly into Stone. The Rollrights are scattered about the hill top, seven hundred feet above sea-level, a mile or so from the quiet village of Little Compton. And this is the old Story of how they came there. Ever so long ago there came marching over the hills a king and his army bent upon the conquest of England. As they neared the summit of the hill the king was met by a witch who told him that he had nearly achieved his desire. She spoke in rhyme, and her words are remembered in the neighbourhood even now. “If Long Compton you can see, King of England you shall be,” she said. The king rushed forward, but, owing to treachery on the part of some of his men, his view of Long Compton, which lies in the valley below, was impeded. Then the witch turned to him with a croaking laugh, and muttered: “As Long Compton you can’t see King of England you shan’t be. Rise up stick, and stand still stone, For King of England you shall be none. You and your men hoar stones shall be And I myself an elder tree.”