Although this preface is not written for the children, yet as there are children who occasionally dip into prefaces, let me call the attention of such to the difference, both in style and point of view, between these stories and those which they have received from the brothers Grimm, from Hans Andersen, and from a host of later writers. All of these drew their material from the same sources as those of the Russian grandmother; but their cultivated minds have worked this material into exquisite literary forms. Not so your own nurses, or even your mothers, who told you wonder-tales before you were old enough to read. Not so the village story-tellers in far-away parts of the world, who, like the Russian grandmother, still hand down to the children the stories they received from parents and grandparents. These sometimes lose the connection; they add little local touches--sweet wine from Zagorjé, going home to Varazdin, and the like--they give to certain incidents the setting with which they are themselves familiar; most artlessly they interweave such results of modern invention and discovery as are familiar to them, with such blank ignorance of physical facts as is shown by bringing in the sun, the moon, the winds, as persons. Many of you know how beautifully George Macdonald did this sort of thing in his story "At the Back of the North Wind," and you perfectly well perceive the difference between that story and such a tale as, for instance, "So Born, So Die," in this book. When you are older you will recognize that it is precisely the difference between literature and folk-lore. That many of these wonder-tales passed through Mohammedan minds on their way to the Russian grandmother, or her great-grandmother, is evident. "The Beg and the Fox" is a striking case in point; it almost seems as if the story ought, like the stories of the "Arabian Nights," to close with the exclamation, "There is no God but God, the High, the Great!" The humor of these stories, however, is unmistakably Slavonic. There is a fine pungency--not Oriental, though Oriental humor is very pungent--in certain of the endings, "I have heard a lie, I have told a lie, and God give you joy!" or after a peculiarly impossible story, "Whoever believes it will be blessed!" The underlying pathos of the story of the Basil-plant suggests the exquisite sentiment of Hans Andersen's "Steadfast Tin Soldier"; but its excessive simplicity, its dropped threads of thought, forbid the idea that it has been worked over by any more sophisticated mind than that of the Russian grandmother.