It is a fascinating as well as a boundless field of writing. In the first place, it contains all the charm that lies in the old, the mysterious, the romantic, the sacred, the poetic, the valorous--words which lure one by their sound as well as by their connotations. Then there is fascination in the fact that the material lies ready for your workmanship. If you do not know a tale or a legend which is connected with your own family or locality, you have only to go upon a short journey of discovery to find literally hundreds. Perhaps the richest treasure-house is the various collections of the Miracles of Our Lady, those current legends of the Middle Ages which centered about the Virgin Mary and from which Anatole France drew his _Juggler to Our Lady_, or the many volumes which tell briefly the lives of the saints. If those do not appeal to you, however, there are scores of marvelous tales and legends of various peoples--Turkish, Egyptian, Indian, Russian, Norse. Lastly, and most important of all, there is fascination in the methods employed in the writing of these tales and legends, in the various ways by which you may gain pictorial charm and artistic effects. From a careful study of the models given in the pages that follow you will note certain outstanding characteristics for which you should strive in your own work: 1. A tendency to plunge at once into the story. There is no expository material and singularly little introduction in the models given. Instead, you are taken into the situation almost with the first sentence: “Once, when Jesus was only five years old, he sat on the doorstep outside his father’s workshop, in Nazareth, and made clay cuckoos from a lump of clay which the potter across the way had given him.” “In the time of King Louis, there lived in France a poor juggler, native of Compiègne, named Barnabas, who went among the villagers doing feats of strength and skill.” 2. A clear and, for the most part, simple narrative style, which proceeds directly to the one major incident to be related and allows few digressions. 3. An emphasis on the concrete. This is well illustrated in _The Legend of the Christmas Rose_ in the minute details which describe the awakening of the forest; in the description from _The Song of the Minister_ of the wondrous _Te Deum_ sung by the stone images in the cathedral; and in the “six copper balls” and the “twelve knives” of Barnabas, the juggler. 4. The use of figures. The clay cuckoos of Jesus in Miss Lagerlöf’s _In Nazareth_ are “as smooth and even as the oak leaves in the forests on Mt. Tabor”; in Göinge forest “the leaves dropped from the trees, rustling like rain.” 5. A delight in color and in the sound of unusual proper names. This two-fold feature is apparent in all the selections. M. E. C. IN NAZARETH SELMA LAGERLÖF