kindness, or heroism. To the careful student of literary types the history of the tale and of the legend and the distinguishing features of each afford a never failing source of interest and pleasure; but to the writer of narrative such a study must be cursory at best. He must, of course, recognize the individualizing attributes of the tale and of the legend; but he must at the same time realize that, although these attributes are in many cases still distinct, they have in many other examples merged into one another. For example, in _The Legend of the Moor’s Legacy_ from Irving’s _Tales of the Alhambra_ (the interchange of the words legend and tale is interesting) which is more distinctly a tale than a legend, there are evident the purely æsthetic charm and fancy that characterize a legend; in Miss Lagerlöf’s beautiful _Legend of the Christmas Rose_, on the other hand, there are, especially in the conduct of the robber woman in Abbot Hans’s garden, some features that marked the earlier tales. Indeed, for practical purposes the words _tale_ and _legend_ may be used almost synonymously by the writer of narrative (as in point of fact they are in many dictionaries) if he has sufficient literary judgment to preserve a consistency of tone or a unity of artistic effect in his own work as he enters into that boundless and fascinating field--the writing or the expanding into literary form of old tales and legends. Nor are these adjectives, it seems to me, ill-chosen. Surely the field is boundless, stretching from the ancient papyrus tales of Egypt to the Indian legends of Minnesota and New Mexico. It includes the traditions sacred to every race and nationality, the stories which have been handed down in families, the tales and legends which add charm and personality to certain localities the world over. If you are of Scandinavian stock, you have a treasure-house in the thousands of old stories of valor and endurance which have been told for centuries by Norse grandmothers to their grandchildren during the long northern winters; if you are of Irish blood, what mysterious and miraculous legends of the earliest Christian centuries await you! It is strange if there are not in your own family tales which have never been put in writing, and stranger if in your own town and county there is not some legend which contains within itself romantic charm enough to justify its telling.