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In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York.

THE Editor has been so fortunate as to be able to separate from a large mass of Indian material — placed at his disposal by the generous friendship of Henry R. Schoolcraft, Esq. — a number of fairy and magical stories, resembling, in romantic interest and quaint extravagance of fancy, the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, Cinderella, Little Red Riding-Hood, and other world-renowned tales of Europe and the East. To Mr. Schoolcraft, the large-hearted and able pioneer of the literature of the Indian race, the world is indebted for the discovery of such tales and legends, and for their first publication in the primitive form as derived from the aborigines, and interpreted by various competent persons. From this novel source the following volume is derived. The stories are not, it will be thus understood, the coinage of our own times, but such as are and have been, time out of mind, recited around the lodge fires and under the old trees of America, by the Indian story-tellers, to soothe and entertain their audiences of the red children. The Editor has bestowed on them, according to his ability, such changes as similar legends most in vogue in other countries have received to adapt them to the compre­hension and sympathy of general readers. He has at times smoothed out, or lengthened, or abridged the thread of the narrative to make it more obvious and more easily followed. He has endeavored always to be directed by the tone and color of the original clew, and to bring to the surface by such skill as he could command, the latent or obscured beauty and interest of the story. It seems like opening a fresh fount­ain in the wilderness at a late day, when thousands and tens of thousands are thirsting for a new draught of such pure and sparkling waters of fancy as have delighted the world.

The Editor hopes that by means of these beautiful and sprightly legends of the West, the glorious debt which we have incurred to the Eastern World for her magical gifts of this kind, will be, in part at least, repaid.

NEW YORK, November, 1855.