During his perusal of a number of legends, the author of this little book was pleased to imagine that, in the bulk of the tales which have been handed down to us, not only the art of the churchly fabulist, but also, upon attentive consideration, traces of a more primitive and more profane love of story-telling, or art of fiction, are perceptible. As the painter is incited by a fragmentary patch of cloud, an outline of a mountain, an etched scrap by some forgotten master, to fill a whole canvas, so the author experienced a desire to reproduce those broken, elusive images; although it must be owned that in the process their faces have often been turned to another quarter of the heavens than that towards which they looked in their extant forms. The huge mass of material available would have made it possible to spin the book out to very great length; but it could only hope to be granted the modest space which it demands if the innocent pleasantry was kept within very moderate limits. EUGENIA The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God. Deut. xxii. 5. When women renounce their ambition of beauty, grace, and womanly charm in order to distinguish themselves in other directions, it often ends in their disguising themselves in men's clothes and disappearing from the scene. The desire to ape the man often emerges even in the pious legendary world of early Christianity, and more than one female saint of those days was impelled by the desire to free herself from the common round of home and society. The refined Roman maiden Eugenia offers an example of this kind, with, it must be owned, the not unusual result, that, reduced to the greatest extremity by her masculine predilections, she was forced after all to summon up the resources of her proper sex in order to save herself. She was the daughter of a Roman gentleman who resided with his family at Alexandria, a city which swarmed with philosophers and learned men of every description. Accordingly, Eugenia was very carefully educated and instructed, and this was so much to her taste that, as soon as ever she began to grow up, she frequented all schools of philosophers, grammarians and rhetoricians as a student. In those visits she was always attended by a body-guard of two good-looking lads of her own age. They were the sons of two of her father's freedmen, who had been brought up in her company and made to share in all her studies.