Note 6 — PREFACE.

At another time one would have to spend hours in listening to detached incidents altogether lacking a thread to connect them, or stories of which the point had been so completely lost that they could only have been made available by means of a reconstruction too integral to be honestly attempted. As, e.g., ‘Oh yes! I know a story of an enchantress who had a gown which made her invisible, and a pair of boots which would carry her a thousand miles without walking, but I quite forget what she did with them.’ Or else it might be, ‘I knew a story of a king whose wife had been fatata (subjected to magic influence), and maligned by her mother-in-law while the king was gone to the wars; but that’s all I remember, except that in the end the queen was rehabilitated, and the mother-in-law punished’—incidents of stories recurring in every collection, but tantalisingly lacking all means of further particular identification with any. Sometimes, too, it would be only a title that could be recalled, and nothing more, as in the case of a certain ‘Uccello Biverde,’6 which I have been several times assured is ‘a most beautiful story,’ but I have never yet succeeded in meeting with any one who could supply the narrative. I have further felt called sometimes to exercise a difficult forbearance in withholding some specimens which at first promised to afford singular instances of interchanged episodes, but which there afterwards appeared reason to conclude were merely jumbled in the bad memory of the narrator, and had, therefore, no individual interest, but were rather calculated to mislead.7