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                          OUTA KAREL'S STORIES

                     South African Folk-Lore Tales

                                   By
                           SANNI METELERKAMP

                With illustrations by Constance Penstone



                       Macmillan and Co., Limited
                      St. Martin's Street, London
                                  1914






                            To all children
                             young and old
                       who love a folk-lore story






FOREWORD.


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 <DW64> 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