Excerpt from Old Stories of the East There are few stories which in themselves are more intensely interesting than those that have come down to us from antiquity through the medium of the Hebrew Scriptures. Yet they have been so generally and so exclusively employed for the purpose of imparting religious instruction, that their purely literary qualities have not always received the attention which they merit. By very many persons, grown-up people as well as children, they are regarded as being inseparably connected with the services of the Sunday school and the Church, and hence scarcely to be thought of during the secular days of the week. There is really no good reason why this should be so. Indeed, there is no good reason why children in the day schools should not read these old stories of the East with as much freedom and with as eager zest as they peruse the classic myths of Greece or the ever-charming tales with which the world of modern fiction abounds. 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.