Of course, the life, customs and social organization of a people who originated in the peculiar way which I have described, and who have lived for centuries in almost complete isolation from all the rest of the world, must present many strange and archaic features. In the secluded valleys of the Eastern Caucasus the modern traveller may study a state of society which existed in England before the Norman Conquest, and see in full operation customs and legal observances which have been obsolete everywhere else in Europe for a thousand years. But it is to the literature of these people rather than to their life or their customs that I wish now particularly to call attention. I have said that they are remarkable for originality and innate intellectual capacity, and I shall endeavor to make good my assertion by presenting some specimens of their songs, fables, riddles, proverbs, burlesques and popular tales. Living as they do on the boundary-line between Europe and Asia, made up as they are of many diverse races, Aryan, Turanian and Semitic, they inherit all the traditionary lore of two continents, and hand down from generation to generation the fanciful tales of the East mingled with the humorous stories, the witty anecdotes and the practical proverbs of the West. You may hear to-day in almost any Caucasian aoul didactic fables from the Sanscrit of the _Hitopadesa_, anecdotes from the _Gulistan_ of the Persian poet Saadi, old jokes from the Grecian jest-book of Hierocles, and humorous exaggerations which you would feel certain must have originated west of the Mississippi River. I heard one night in a lonely mountain-village in the Eastern Caucasus from the lips of a Daghestan mountaineer a humorous story which had been told me less than a year before by a student of the Western Reserve College at Hudson, Ohio, and which I had supposed to be an invention of the mirth-loving sophomores of that institution. But the literature which the Caucasian mountaineers have inherited, and which they share with all the Semitic and Indo-European races, is not so deserving of notice as the literature which they have themselves invented--the stories, songs, anecdotes and burlesques which bear the peculiar impress of their own character. I shall endeavor, therefore, in giving specimens of Caucasian folk-lore, to confine myself to stories, songs and proverbs which are peculiar to the mountaineers themselves, or which have been worked over and modified to accord with Caucasian tastes and standards. It will be seen that I use the word "literature" in the widest possible sense, to include not only what is commonly called folk-lore, but also oaths, greetings, speeches, prayers and all other forms of mental expression which in anyway illustrate character.