THE word Folktale covers much ground. In essence it means a tale which has been handed down orally, and in general by people not much given to reading and writing. Among these tales it is possible to distinguish several well marked varieties. We have the fairy story, such as Puss in Boots, Cinderella or Jack and the Beanstalk ; we have the simple oral novel, a story of what is presented as being real though much romanticised life : here may rank The Forty Thieves, and the kind of story which, when it has passed into written literature, we find in The Canterbury Tales, and in the Decameron and in some of the ancient Greek novels; we have the stories which illustrate popular wit and wisdom; and very close to these the definitely moral tales, of which we find so many in the medieval collections of exempla, stories largely for use in the pulpit. Besides all these there are anecdotes of many kinds. Then there are the animal stories, particularly common among peoples of the simpler sort, but among the Greeks comparatively rare. Rigid lines of classification can hardly be drawn, and further subdivisions might easily be suggested. For the present I need only suggest this rough enumeration, and in these remarks I hardly mean to go beyond the fairytales and the moral stories and simple novels often closely allied to them; even arising out of them. Most of my examples will be drawn from a large collection of stories from the Greek Dodekanese, written down some forty years ago by a local scholar, Jacob Zarraftis, and by him sent to Dr. W. H. D. Rouse. One of the most obvious points of interest in these stories is that they throw light on the lives and minds of the people who tell them : people fundamentally very like ourselves, although on the surface often so very different. But that they can be looked at in this way I should say at once has been very flatly denied, and by no less an authority than the late Emmanuel Cosquin, and the point of view of such a scholar can haridly be left unnoticed.' Quite rightly Cosquin refused to believe that a story with an ordered series of episodes, that is a story with a worked out plot, could ever have been invented in more than one place: all stories, how-