Page:More Australian legendary tales.djvu/21



has requested me to write a little "fore-word" to her new collection of Australian popular tales. "Good wine," like these stories, "needs no bush," and Mrs. Parker's intimate knowledge of the bush and its wild native lords cannot be improved by any merely literary information. Yet one would not willingly disoblige a lady to whom children owe so much for her legends, and who has so remarkably vindicated the thoroughly human and amiable character of an unfortunate people.

These dark backward friends of hers, "the blacks," are, we find, "very much like you and me," as Mr. Kipling says, or rather they are our superiors in poetical fancy. Without our savage ancestors we should certainly have had no poetry. Conceive the human race born into the world in its present advanced condition, weighing, analysing, examining everything, except a few phenomena which happen not to chime in with the general ideas of science. Such a race would have been destitute of poetry and flattened by common sense. The world would never have been "dispeopled of its dreams," because there would have been no