Methods of story-telling. Animal stories. _Brer Rabbit._ Borrowed tales. Value of native folk-lore. We have mentioned that one of the great amusements, both of children and grown-up people, is story-telling—_ku imba ntanu_. This means literally ‘to sing a story,’ and points to the way in which tales are usually told. Most of them contain short pieces which are sung, and are known to every one—so that, when the narrator comes to them, the audience all join in. Steere points out that these sung parts are very common in the Swahili tales, and that the language found in them is older than what is usually spoken, or than the rest of the story. Another curious point is that, when a man is telling a story late at night—say, beside the camp-fire or on a journey—at every pause in his narrative the hearers exclaim in chorus, ‘We are all here!’ As the tale goes on, the responses become fewer and fewer, and at last, when no one is left awake to answer, the recitation stops. The stories told by the Bantu of British Central Africa are, broadly speaking, of three kinds. First, we have legends about the origin of men and things, such as we noticed in the fourth chapter, with which may be grouped the traditions telling whence the different tribes came, and how they reached their present homes. About these last I shall have something to say in the next chapter. Secondly, we have the kind of animal story so well exemplified in _Uncle Remus_. And, thirdly, tales in which people, animals, and sometimes preternatural beings are mixed up together in a series of more or less marvellous incidents—like our own fairy stories, in fact. Some of these we can trace as imported; but they are none the less curious on that account. The animal stories seem to be the commonest and best known among the Anyanja—at least, nearly all the stories I could induce natives to tell me were of this kind. The tales collected by Mr. Macdonald, and published in _Africana_, however, belong largely to the first and second classes. Some are like very faint and far-off echoes of the _Arabian Nights_; these have probably been heard on the coast by Yaos who have gone down with trading-parties, and retold in the villages on their return. An example of this kind is ‘The Story of the Chief,’ which will be given later on.