Excerpt from The Young Folks' Library: Selection From the Choicest Literature of All Lands Legends are like the vines and tendrils that grow up about a tree. These sometimes hide its strength and cause its death, but they also lend to it a great and varied charm of color and outline. So Legends some times take the place of the real facts of history, but usually only add to them some touch of pathos or ten der human interest. To - day trained judgment has pruned away many old Legends from the great trunk of history. In this cleansing process, however, we have learned that Legends, like Myths, have their uses; that they are often symbols of deep truths that were once known to all, but in tme became changed into new shapes, often through ignorance and bad passions of the heart and mind. 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.