The commencement of our Third Volume affords an opportunity, which we gladly seize, of returning our best thanks to those kind friends and correspondents to whom we are indebted for our continued success. We thank them all heartily and sincerely; and we trust that the volume, of which we now present them with the First Number, will afford better proof of our gratitude than mere words. Such improvements as have suggested themselves in the course of the fourteen months during which NOTES AND QUERIES has been steadily working up its way to its present high position shall be effected; and nothing shall be wanting, on our part, which may conduce to maintain or increase its usefulness. And here we would announce a slight change in our mode of publication, which we have acceded to at the suggestion of several parties, in order to meet what may appear to many of our readers a trivial matter, but which is found very inconvenient in a business point of view--we allude to the diversity of price in our Monthly Parts. To avoid this, and, as we have said, to meet the wishes of many of our friends, we propose to publish a fifth or supplementary number in every month in which there are only four Saturdays, so as to make the Monthly Parts one shilling and threepence each in all cases, with the exception of the months of January and July, which will include the Index of the preceding Half-yearly Volume, at the price of one shilling and ninepence each. Thus the yearly subscription to NOTES AND QUERIES, either in unstamped weekly Numbers or Monthly Parts, will be eighteen shillings. Trusting that this, and all the other arrangements we are proposing to ourselves, may meet with the approbation of our friends and subscribers, we bid them Farewell! and wish them,--what we trust they wish to NOTES AND QUERIES--a Happy New Year, and many of them! * * * * * NOTES. OLD BALLAD UPON THE "WINTER'S TALE." Some of your correspondents may be able to give me information respecting an old ballad that has very recently fallen in my way, on a story similar to that of Shakspeare's _Winter's Tale_, and in some particulars still more like Greene's novel of _Pandosto_, upon which the _Winter's Tale_ was founded. You are aware that the earliest known edition of Greene's novel is dated 1588, although there is room to suspect that it had been originally {2} printed before that year: the first we hear of the _Winter's Tale_ is in 1611, when it was acted at court, and it was not printed until it appeared in the folio of 1623.