in the end find yourself possessed of nothing save some feeble variant
of a well-known legend, or, what is worse, a compilation of oddments
which have lingered in a faulty memory from half a dozen distinct
stories. After a time, however, the attentive collector is rewarded
by finding that a coherent whole is growing up in his or her mind out
of the shreds and patches heard here and there, and it is delight
indeed when your own dim suspicion that this part of the puzzle fits
into that is confirmed by finding the two incidents preserved side by
side in the mouth of some perfectly unconscious witness. Some of the
tales in this volume have thus been a year or more on the stocks
before they had been heard sufficiently often to make their form
conclusive.

And this accounts for what may be called the greater literary sequence
of these tales over those to be found in many similar collections.
They have been selected carefully with the object of securing a good
story in what appears to be its best form; but they have not been
doctored in any way, not even in the language. That is neither a
transliteration--which would have needed a whole dictionary to be
intelligible--nor a version orientalised to suit English tastes. It
is an attempt to translate one colloquialism by another, and thus to
preserve the aroma of rough ready wit existing side by side with that
perfume of pure poesy which every now and again contrasts so strangely
with the other. Nothing would have been easier than to alter the
style; but to do so would, in the collector's opinion, have robbed the
stories of all human value.

That such has been the deliberate choice may be seen at a glance
through the only story which has a different origin. The Adventures
of Raja Rasalu was translated from the rough manuscript of a village