or made a walking tour up into the mountains, the fondest object of the journey was to coax a story out, of every peasant whom they met. Asbjörnsen soon surpassed Moe in the width of his experience; his profession was one which took him habitually from one end of the kingdom to the other, whereas his friend, with a genius perhaps more naturally attuned than his to the music of mountain and cascade, settled down as a country parson into a narrower and more humdrum circle. Yet it is Moe, and specially in that delightful study of his entitled Blind Anne, who has given us the most complete and vivid sketch of the mode in which the friends collected the materials for their books. In 1838 Asbjörnsen first made public the results of his investigations, very shyly and timorously, in a little publication for children, called Nor. Not until 1842 did the first authorised edition of Norwegian Folk and Fairy Tales, collected by Peter Christen Asbjörnsen and Jörgen Moe, see the light at Christiania; it gradually became widely successful, and was followed in 1871 by a new selection, from the pen of Asbjörnsen alone. In the mean time, as early as 1845, Asbjörnsen had published his well-known volume of Huldre-eventyr, or stories about the nymphs or sirens which haunt the high, sparse woods and mountain dairies. Of these also a second selection was printed in 1848. The present gathering of tales, therefore, is a nosegay plucked from these four gardens of the imagination, wild plots full of strange Alpine blossoms and perfumed with the wind from the pine-forest.
