Never before has the world turned so attentively to the shorter forms of fiction.

Not only is this true of the printed short-story, of which some thousands, more or less new, are issued every year in English, but oral story-telling is taking its deserved place in the school, the home, and among clubs specially organized for its cultivation.

Teachers and parents must therefore be increasingly alert, not only to invent new stories, but--this even chiefly--to familiarize themselves with the oldest stories in the world.
So it is to such sources as these race-narratives that all story-telling must come for recurrent inspirations.

The setting of each new story may be tinged with what wild or sophisticated life soever, yet must the narrator find the big, heart-swelling movements and passions and thraldoms and conquests and sufferings and elations of mankind stored in the great epics of the world.
It were a life-labor to become familiar with all of these in their expressive originals; even in translation it would be a titanic task to read each one.

Therefore how great is our indebtedness to the ripe scholarship and discreet choice of the author of this "Book of the Epic" for having brought to us not only the arguments but the very spirit and flavor of all this noble array.