give to the whole a genuine flavour of the old plantation. Each legend has its variants, but in every instance I have retained that particular version which seemed to me to be the most characteristic, and have given it without embellishment and without exaggeration. The dialect, it will be observed, is wholly different from that of the Hon. Pompey Smash and his literary descendants, and different also from the intolerable misrepresentations of the minstrel stage, but it is at least phonetically genuine. Nevertheless, if the language of Uncle Remus fail to give vivid hints of the really poetic imagination of the negro; if it fail to embody the quaint and homely humour which was his most prominent characteristic; if it do not suggest a certain picturesque sensitiveness-a curious exaltation of mind and temperament not to be defined by words-then I have reproduced the form of the dialect merely, and not the essence, and my attempt may be accounted a failure. At any rate, I trust I have been successful in presenting what must be, at least to a large portion of my readers, a new and by no means unattractive phase of negro character-a phase which may be considered a curiously sympathetic supplement to Mrs. Stowe's wonderful defence of slavery as it existed in the South. Mrs. Stowe, let me hasten to say, attacked the possibilities of slavery with all the eloquence of genius; but the same genius painted the portrait of the Southern slave-owner; and defended him. A number of the plantation legends originally appeared in the columns of a newspaper, and in that shape they attracted the attention of various gentlemen who were kind enough to suggest that they would prove to be valuable contributions to myth-literature. It is but fair to say that ethnological considerations formed no part of the undertaking which has resulted in |