E-text prepared by MFR, Susan Carr, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)
Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations in colour. See 63858-h.htm or 63858-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/63858/63858-h/63858-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/63858/63858-h.zip)
Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/storytellingball00olc
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Text enclosed by equal signs is in bold face (=bold=).
[Illustration: THE LIFT GREW DARK, AND THE WIND BLEW LOUD, AND GURLY GREW THE SEA (_page 5_)]
Selected and Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the Boys’ and Girls’ Own Reading
Boston and New York Houghton Mifflin Company The Riverside Press Cambridge 1920
Copyright, 1920, by Frances Jenkins Olcott
The Riverside Press Cambridge . Massachusetts U . S . A
Here are 77 story-telling ballads and narrative poems, that will make the heart beat faster and the pulse bound, of any boy or girl from twelve to fifteen years of age.
They offer a feast of good things--romances, hero-tales, Faërie legends, and adventures of Knights and lovely Damsels. They sing of proud and wicked folk, of gentle and loyal ones, of Laidley Worms, Witches, Mermaids with golden combs, sad maidens, glad ones and fearless lovers, moss-troopers, border-rievers, and Kings in disguise. All their doings are related in the stirring, leaping, joyous--or at times martial and mournful-ballad measure.
The ancient ballads are here presented exactly as when in days of old they were sung by minstrels and recited by gaffers and gammers. No alterations are made in the texts of the ballad-collectors and collators, except the changing of a few objectionable words. Two or three of the less well-known ballads are done into modern spelling. A number, not hitherto found in children’s collections, will be delightfully new to young people. Some popular ballads, like “King John and the Abbot of Canterbury,” and “The King and the Miller of Mansfield,” are omitted because they are in _Story-Telling Poems_.