YÊ.
i. every night, just before bedtime, I hear some group of children in the street telling stories to each other. Stories, enigmas or tim-tim, and songs, and round games, are the joy of child-life here,—whether rich or poor. I am particularly fond of listening to the stories, — which seem to me the oddest stories I ever heard. I succeeded in getting several dictated to me, so that I could write them ;—others were written for me by creole friends, with better success. T o obtain them in all their original simplicity and naive humor of detail, one should be able to write them down in short-hand as fast as they are related : they lose greatly in the slow process of dictation. The simple mind of the native story-teller, child or adult, is seriously tried by the inevitable interruptions and restraints of the dictation method ;—the reciter loses spirit, becomes soon weary, and purposely shortens the narrative to finish the task as soon as possible. It seems painful to such a one to repeat a phrase more than once,—at least in the same way ; while frequent questioning may irritate the most good-natured in a degree that shows how painful to the untrained brain may be the exercise of memory and steady control of imagination required for continuous dictation. By patience, however, I succeeded in obtaining many curiosities of oral literature,—representing a group of stories which, whatever their primal origin, have ALMOST