Such a compilation is genuinely valuable to the anthropologist, the folk-lorist, the historian, the teacher, but to none of them more so than to the student of imaginative literature or, indeed, to the creative writer. Every folk-superstition alluded to in _Tom Sawyer_ and _Huckleberry Finn_ is here recorded. Other superstitions in this collection it is easy to remember from various novels and tales of Kentucky life. And yet to read the book with such matters in mind is to realize how little the riches of our folk-lore have been utilized. Consider Thomas Hardy, working away like a profound mole among the buried lores and memories of Wessex, and then consider the so much more trivial, the sentimental use that literary Kentuckians have made of their materials. The ordinary attitude of American men of letters is that inasmuch as we have a briefer history on this continent than Europeans have on theirs, there is hardly an excuse for investigating our own folk-lore and employing it. But, of course, the folk here is as old as the folk there, in any but a political or geographical, and therefore superficial, sense. It has, too, customs and superstitions developed on the native soil. Here is an extraordinarily important field for the imaginative writer to plough. We write of our smart sets, tinkling and cosmopolitan; we write of our Indians and Negroes, looking for essentially native material there; but between these extremes, except in the highly circumscribed “local colour” stories, we have done little to sound the life and opinions of our folk as regards anything deeper than their outward manners. In _Kentucky Superstitions_ we have a document to help us in going deeper. There is the germ of such another story as Hardy’s _The Withered Arm_ in the Kentucky belief that “You may remove birth-marks by rubbing them with the hand of a corpse.” There are poetry and drama both in one superstition from the mountains: “A maid says: ‘If I’m not going to marry anybody, knock, Death, knock!’ If she hears nothing, she says: ‘If I’m going to marry a young man, whistle, bird whistle!’ If her appeal remains unanswered, she says: ‘If I’m going to marry an old man, hoot, owl, hoot!’” PAUL BUNYAN GOES WEST