INTRODUCTION.

THe favourable reception given to my volume of
Russian Fairy Tales has encouraged me to follow
it up with a sister volume of stories selected from
another Slavonic dialect extraordinarily rich in folk-
tales—I mean Ruthenian, the language of the
Cossacks.

Ruthenian is a language intermediate between
Russian and Polish, but quite independent of both.
Its territory embraces, roughly speaking, that vast
plain which hes between the Carpathians, the water-
shed of the Dnieper, and the Sea of Azov, with
Lemberg and Kiev for its chief intellectual centres :
though rigorously repressed by the Russian Gov-
ernment, it is still spoken by more than twenty
millions of people. It possesses a noble literature,
numerous folk-songs, not inferior even to those of
Servia, and, what chiefly concerns us now, a copious
collection of justly admired folk-tales, many of them
of great antiquity, which are regarded, both in Russia
and Poland, as quite unique of their kind. Mr.