To all children
young and old
who love a folk-lore story
Foreword.
My thanks are due to Dr. Maitland Park, Editor of The Cape Times, and Adv. B. K. Long, M.L.A., Editor of The State, for their kind permission to republish such of these tales as have appeared in their papers.
For the leading idea in “The Sun” and “The Stars and the Stars’ Road,” I gladly acknowledge my indebtedness to that monument of patient labour and research, “Specimens of Bushman Folk-lore,” by the late Dr. Bleek and Miss Lucy Lloyd.
Further, I lay no claim to originality for any of the stories in this collection—at best a very small proportion of a vast store from which the story-teller of the future may draw, embodying the superstitions, the crude conceptions, the childish ideas of a primitive and rapidly disappearing people. They are known in some form or other wherever the negro has set foot, and are the common property of every country child in South Africa.
I greatly regret that they appear here in what is, to them, a foreign tongue. No one who has not heard them in the Taal—that quaint, expressive language of the people—can have any idea of what they lose through translation, but, having been written in the first instance for English publications, the original medium was out of the question.