Turkish Fairy Tales

THE stories comprising this collection have been culled with my own hands in the many-hued garden of Turkish folklore. They have not been gathered from books, for Turkey is not a literary land, and no books of the kind exist; but, an attentive listener to "the storytellers" who form a peculiar feature of the social life of the Ottomans, I have jotted them down from time to time, and now present them, a choice bouquet, to the English reading public. The stories are such as may be heard daily in the purlieus of Stamboul, in the small rickety houses of that essentially Turkish quarter of Constantinople where around the tandir the native women relate them to their children and friends.