Bengali Household Tales

Excerpt from Bengali Household Tales The Tales, forming this book, have been selected from amongst a large number which I collected upwards of twenty-five years ago. Nos. IV., VII., XXI., and XXII., and, possibly, one or two others, have appeared in the Calcutta Englishman, to the proprietors of which I am indebted for permission to republish them, and Nos. I., II., and V. were included in an article on "Fate" I contributed to the Madras Christian College Magazine. None of the rest, so far as I know, have as yet been published in English. Nearly all those in Mr. Day's collection were narrated to me in one form or another, but I have excluded from this selection any of my own gathering which seemed to be mere variants of stories in his book. The Narrator of the greater part of the Tales I gathered, was a very intelligent young Brahman, an orthodox Hindu, whose home was in an extremely out-of-the-way village, and who, when I first became acquainted with him, had been little in contact with Europeans. He possessed fine gifts, both as a talker and a raconteur. Yet I found no reason to doubt his often-repeated assertion that he told me the stories exactly as he had heard them. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.