Featured on PDR in the collection Happy Together: The Laughing Prince: A Book of Jugoslav Fairy Tales and Folk Tales (1921)

“You shall stay with me now forever and we shall be very happy together”, says the Beggar to the Poor Man at the end of “The Silver Tracks”, before revealing that he is in fact Christ in disguise, there to welcome his long-suffering companion into the Garden of Paradise. It’s the kind of just-so ending common to folklore traditions the world over. And yet, taken out of context, the line could also perhaps describe something else: the way that the stories we hear as children never really disappear but travel with us forever, in the morals they impart, in the narrative structures they accustom us to, and above all else in the warmth of recognition and longing they produce when we recognize something of them…