My familiarity with the earlier edition of Eastern Stories and Legends and my personal introduction of “The True Spirit of a Festival Day” and other stories to audiences of parents and teachers, enables me to speak with confidence of the value of the book in an enlarged and more popular form.
In rearranging and expanding her selection of stories Miss Shedlock has wisely freed the book from limitations which gave it too much the appearance of a text book. In so doing she has preserved the classical rendering of her earlier work. Her long experience as a teacher and story-teller in England and America informs her notes and arouses in the mature reader a fresh sense of the “power to educate” which rises out of all great literature at the touch of a true interpreter.
And it came to pass that the Buddha (to be) was born again as a Lion. Just as he had helped his fellow-men, he now began to help his fellow-animals, and there was a great deal to be done. For instance, there was a little nervous Hare who was always afraid that something dreadful was going to happen to her. She was always saying: “Suppose the Earth were to fall in, what would happen to me?” And she said this so often that at last she thought it really was about to happen. One day, when she had been saying over and over again, “Suppose the Earth were to fall in, what would happen to me?” she heard a slight noise: it really was only a heavy fruit which had fallen upon a rustling leaf, but the little Hare was so nervous she was ready to believe anything, and she said in a frightened tone: “The Earth _is_ falling in.” She ran away as fast as she could go, and presently she met an old brother Hare, who said: “Where are you running to, Mistress Hare?”
And the little Hare said: “I have no time to stop and tell you anything. The Earth is falling in, and I am running away.”
“The Earth is falling in, is it?” said the old brother Hare, in a tone of much astonishment; and he repeated this to _his_ brother hare, and _he_ to _his_ brother hare, and _he_ to _his_ brother hare, until at last there were a hundred thousand brother hares, all shouting: “The Earth is falling in.” Now presently the bigger animals began to take the cry up. First the deer, and then the sheep, and then the wild boar, and then the buffalo, and then the camel, and then the tiger, and then the elephant.