My thanks are due to Dr. Maitland Park, Editor of The Cape Times, and
Adv. B. K. Long, M.L.A., Editor of The State, for their kind permission
to republish such of these tales as have appeared in their papers.
For the leading idea in "The Sun" and "The Stars and the Stars'
Road," I gladly acknowledge my indebtedness to that monument of
patient labour and research, "Specimens of Bushman Folk-lore," by
the late Dr. Bleek and Miss Lucy Lloyd.
Further, I lay no claim to originality for any of the stories in this
collection--at best a very small proportion of a vast store from which
the story-teller of the future may draw, embodying the superstitions,
the crude conceptions, the childish ideas of a primitive and rapidly
disappearing people. They are known in some form or other wherever
the negro has set foot, and are the common property of every country
child in South Africa.
I greatly regret that they appear here in what is, to them, a foreign
tongue. No one who has not heard them in the Taal--that quaint,
expressive language of the people--can have any idea of what they lose
through translation, but, having been written in the first instance
for English publications, the original medium was out of the question.
Clear cold evenings, with a pleasant tang of frost in the air,
figure here and there in these pages, but as I write other scenes,
too, flit across the lighted screen of Memory--noontides of tropic
heat with all the world sunk in a languorous slumber, glowing sunsets,
throbbing summer nights when the stars seemed to tremble almost within
one's reach, moonlit spaces filled with soft mystery and the thousand
seductive voices of the pulsing southern night. And always, part and
parcel of the passing panorama, the quaint figure of the old Native
with his little masters....
It is nearly three years now since "Old Friend Death" took him gently
by the hand and led him away to that far, far country of which he had
such vague ideas, so he tells no more stories by the firelight in the
gloaming; and his little masters--children no longer--are claimed
by graver tasks and wider interests. But in the hope that others,
both little ones and children of a larger growth, may find the same
pleasure in these tales of a childlike race, they are sent out to
find their own level and take their chance in the workaday world.