Beecher - The Anxious Leaf - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

Long before the late Leo Buscaglia's classic look at life and death from the viewpoint of a leaf in 1982's The Fall of Freddie the Leaf, today's little story from the viewpoint of "The Anxious Leaf" appeared.  It's in an early 20th century series of textbooks by E.C. Hartwell I find most useful, Story Hour Readings, in this case for the Fourth Year.  There is a bit of suggestions at the end for ways to use it in class added by Doctor Hartwell, but the story originates with Henry Ward Beecher.  The book gives the simplest of author's biography, suitable for a child, but his own life seems right out of today's news and I'll give more after the story.  I'll also add ways to use it.

It's a simple enough story and I like to include the sort of supplementary books a One Room School Teacher might include in her classroom when doing my program on One Room Schools as I did this past week, but it has many uses beyond that.

Of course teachers like to assign leaf identification as it's an easy assignment at this time of year.  I'm a longtime member of the Arbor Day Foundation and believe strongly in their goals of planting trees where they are so needed.  As a result I recommend purchasing their pocket field guides, "What Tree Is That?", which now even has an iPhone app. (I hope they soon do one for Android.)

Also colorful autumn leaves have a multitude of craft uses.  Google "leaf crafts" for more than you could possibly use.  There are crafts all the way from preschoolers to adult.  I like to mention how the One Room School Teachers would give the little ones a simple craft related to what they were studying.  I even show a large early 20th century book of "manual seatwork" with the kind of simple crafts we all should experience in school or in after-school activities.

Of course fallen leaves are useful also to gardeners.  The "Old Farmer's Almanac" urges using them instead of sending them to a landfill.

Beyond the One Room School I will soon be back doing classroom residencies and work with homeschoolers.  This little story is a perfect introduction to getting into the mind of an inanimate object and creating an adventure or even a biography.

Now speaking of biographies, I promised the author would fit right into today's news: People magazine would notice his famous family (his father, Lyman Beecher, was the best-known evangelist of his day, while his brothers and sisters were also prominent, especially his famous sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin); he was a popular public speaker beyond the pulpit; he was an abolitionist, which today continues in the crusade against human trafficking; supported the suffragists and temperance, which could be called women's issues; then came a scandal worthy of the "Me, Too" movement from which he was officially exonerated.  Take a look at least at Wikipedia, but you should also search for Henry Ward Beecher quotes.  There are well over 300 and many are illustrated in a style worthy of inspirational posters.

Of course my favorite is

I hope you feel the same about keeping alive the many stories that are part of the Public Domain.
**************************

This is part of a series of postings of stories under the category, "Keeping the Public in Public Domain."  The idea behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the authors and their immediate heirs were compensated.  I feel strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the 20th century.  My own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public Domain I decided to share stories from them.  I hope you enjoy discovering new stories.  

At the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an audience.  Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing of Public Domain stories will not occur that week.  This is a return to my regular posting of a research project here.  (Don't worry, this isn't dry research, my research is always geared towards future storytelling to an audience.)  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my other postings as often as I can manage it.

Other Public Domain story resources I recommend-

• There are many online resources for Public Domain stories, maybe none for folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection.  I have long recommended it and continue to do so.  He has loaded Stith Thompson's Motif Index into his server as a database so you can search the whole 6 volumes for whatever word or expression you like by pressing one key. http://folkmasa.org/motiv/motif.htm

• You may have noticed I'm no longer certain Dr. Perez has the largest database, although his offering the Motif Index certainly qualifies for those of us seeking specific types of stories.  There's another site, FairyTalez claiming to be the largest, with "over 2000 fairy tales, folktales, and fables" and they are "fully optimized for phones, tablets, and PCs", free and presented without ads.
  
  Between those two sites, there is much for story-lovers, but as they say in infomercials, "Wait, there's more!"

The email list for storytellers, Storytell, discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional suggestions:            

         - David K. Brown - http://people.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html

         - Karen Chace - http://karenchace.blogspot.com/search?q=public+domain

         - Richard Martin - http://www.tellatale.eu/tales_page.html

         - Spirit of Trees - http://spiritoftrees.org/featured-folktales

         - Story-Lovers - http://www.story-lovers.com/ is now only accessible through the Wayback Machine, described below, but Jackie Baldwin's wonderful site lives on there, fully searchable manually (the Google search doesn't work), at https://archive.org/ .  It's not easy, but go to Story-lovers.com snapshot for October 22 2016  and you can click on SOS: Searching Out Stories to scroll down through the many story topics and click on the story topic that interests you.

       - Tim Sheppard - http://www.timsheppard.co.uk/story/storylinks.html

       - World of Tales - http://www.worldoftales.com/ 

     
You're going to find many of the links on these sites have gone down, BUT go to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find some of these old links.  Tim's site, for example, is so huge probably updating it would be a full-time job.  In the case of Story-Lovers, it's great that Jackie Baldwin set it up to stay online as long as it did after she could no longer maintain it.  Possibly searches maintained it.  Unfortunately Storytell list member, Papa Joe is on both Tim Sheppard's site and Story-Lovers, but he no longer maintains his old Papa Joe's Traveling Storytelling Show website and his Library (something you want to see!) is now only on the Wayback Machine.  It took some patience working back through claims of snapshots but finally in December of 2006 it appears!

Somebody as of this writing whose stories can still be found by his website is the late Chuck Larkin - http://chucklarkin.com/stories.html.  I prefer to list these sites by their complete address so they can be found by the Wayback Machine, a.k.a. Archive.org, when that becomes the only way to find them.

You can see why I recommend these to you. Have fun discovering even more stories!

Cox - Jack, the Giant of the Sea - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

While traveling I try to always visit local antique stores.  Whether something historical, musical, or in print, serendipity rules and may show up on my blog or in programs.  This past week I found a most unusual book by Palmer Cox, the Canadian author/illustrator best known for his series of children's books about The Brownies.  Cox first produced the mischievous characters for children's magazines like the legendary "St. Nicholas Magazine" and "Harper's Young People", and in newspaper comic strips until a book, The Brownies: Their Book in 1887 compiled some of these vignettes for the first of many books about them plus two very successful plays.  Their enduring popularity was shown in a 1988 Tuttle reprint of the Brownie Yearbook.  Earlier in 1971 Tuttle's reprint of Bugaboo Bill about how a village got rid of a troublesome giant is reminiscent of today's story.  I'll give the tale first and then say more about Cox, his Brownies, and the source of today's story.

 

Great story?  Dunberidiculous!  The "bones" of a story, however, are there, so it would be an excellent starter for story creation with a group of young future writers.  After that it would be good to share Palmer Cox's version including his lively illustrations which, frankly, have more detail and character than his fairly simple story.

Two online biographies of Cox tell about some of his work, the omnipresent Wikipedia article and a Canadian Masonic article, which says there were 25 books in all, but neither article nor the many online at Internet Archive nor the few available from Project Gutenberg list them all, nor include my own battered unlisted anthology, Palmer Cox's Book of Fairy Tales and Pictures, which was inexpensively produced back in 1896 and 1897 by Hubbard Publishing Company and in 1902 by Hurst & Company.  The Masonic site says that many books used Cox's name with his illustrations and previously published selections.  Since he also wrote for many magazines, including "Ladies Home Journal", there was plenty of material to compile.  The paper quality is poor and the stapled binding is only attached to the book's back, but as a result it is possible to copy even if every other page must be on an angle.  The original owner, Orlo F. Jones, clearly loved the book subtitled "A Selected Collection of this Famous Artist's Best Efforts for the Amusement and Joy of Our Young Folks." It is mainly anthropomorphic stories about animals, although one Brownie tale, "The Brownies' Kind Deed", is included.

Those Brownies have their own, earlier hotlinked, Wikipedia article, relating their inspiring a wide variety of merchandise, even Kodak's inexpensive "Brownie Camera", yet Cox is reported to have received nothing from the commercial use of his creatures.  Still he clearly did well enough as that same Canadian Masonic site shows Cox's 17-room dream home, Brownie Castle, that his brothers built it to his design at the start of the twentieth in his hometown of Granby, Quebec.  Brownie Castle was constructed with six staircases, a Brownie stained-glass window, and a four-story octagonal tower.  A running Brownie weather vane topped a nearby barn.

************************** 
Now for the "fine print."

This is part of a series of postings of stories under the category, "Keeping the Public in Public Domain."  The idea behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the authors and their immediate heirs were compensated.  I feel strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the 20th century.  My own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public Domain I decided to share stories from them.  I hope you enjoy discovering new stories.  

At the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an audience.  Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing of Public Domain stories will not occur that week.  This is a return to my regular posting of a research project here.  (Don't worry, this isn't dry research, my research is always geared towards future storytelling to an audience.)  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my other postings as often as I can manage it.

Other Public Domain story resources I recommend-

• There are many online resources for Public Domain stories, maybe none for folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection.  I have long recommended it and continue to do so.  He has loaded Stith Thompson's Motif Index into his server as a database so you can search the whole 6 volumes for whatever word or expression you like by pressing one key. http://folkmasa.org/motiv/motif.htm

• You may have noticed I'm no longer certain Dr. Perez has the largest database, although his offering the Motif Index certainly qualifies for those of us seeking specific types of stories.  There's another site, FairyTalez claiming to be the largest, with "over 2000 fairy tales, folktales, and fables" and they are "fully optimized for phones, tablets, and PCs", free and presented without ads.
  
  Between those two sites, there is much for story-lovers, but as they say in infomercials, "Wait, there's more!"

The email list for storytellers, Storytell, discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional suggestions:            

         - David K. Brown - http://people.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html

         - Karen Chace - http://karenchace.blogspot.com/search?q=public+domain

         - Richard Martin - http://www.tellatale.eu/tales_page.html

         - Spirit of Trees - http://spiritoftrees.org/featured-folktales

         - Story-Lovers - http://www.story-lovers.com/ is now only accessible through the Wayback Machine, described below, but Jackie Baldwin's wonderful site lives on there, fully searchable manually (the Google search doesn't work), at https://archive.org/ .  It's not easy, but go to Story-lovers.com snapshot for October 22 2016  and you can click on SOS: Searching Out Stories to scroll down through the many story topics and click on the story topic that interests you.

       - Tim Sheppard - http://www.timsheppard.co.uk/story/storylinks.html

       - World of Tales - http://www.worldoftales.com/ 

     
You're going to find many of the links on these sites have gone down, BUT go to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find some of these old links.  Tim's site, for example, is so huge probably updating it would be a full-time job.  In the case of Story-Lovers, it's great that Jackie Baldwin set it up to stay online as long as it did after she could no longer maintain it.  Possibly searches maintained it.  Unfortunately Storytell list member, Papa Joe is on both Tim Sheppard's site and Story-Lovers, but he no longer maintains his old Papa Joe's Traveling Storytelling Show website and his Library (something you want to see!) is now only on the Wayback Machine.  It took some patience working back through claims of snapshots but finally in December of 2006 it appears!

Somebody as of this writing whose stories can still be found by his website is the late Chuck Larkin - http://chucklarkin.com/stories.html.  I prefer to list these sites by their complete address so they can be found by the Wayback Machine, a.k.a. Archive.org, when that becomes the only way to find them.

You can see why I recommend these to you. Have fun discovering even more stories!

Babbitt - The Pennywise Monkey - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

Monkeying around implies doing dumb things.

 We all do dumb things from time to time, sometimes even in clusters.  My husband refers to expensive ones as paying "Stupidity Tax."  Yep, been there. . . recently.  Rather than sit and bemoan dumb things done, it pays to look at whatever positives you can find.  There may not be many.  In my case I now have a newer version of Android on a newer tablet.  As for the other things that went wrong. . . 'nuff said.

Sometimes it also helps to read or watch a story about something even worse.  First I would like you to make a return visit to a very short story from Ellen C. Babbitt called "The Stupid Monkeys" and it's in her second book of Indian stories called More Jataka Tales.

If you clicked on that story you found a discussion about how proverbs make a great starting point for writing a story, especially a fable with animals.  Then the question was whether or not to tell the moral (the proverb or lesson) of the story or let the reader or audience draw its own conclusion.  Babbitt never tells, but lets you draw your own conclusions.  If indeed you read the story I posted back in 2015 (my this has been a long time!), I don't comment on how it wasn't half as stupid for the monkeys as it was for that human gardener and I doubt he kept his job.

Monkeys are numerous in India and so they are also numerous in the Jataka Tales.  That 2015 article also told about the origin of the Jataka Tales.  Babbitt did a very tellable slender pair of books for her version.  Buddhist literature has them for their earliest literature and Aesop Fables and also the Hindu Panchatantra share some of the same stories.  This isn't one of them, but maybe it should be.

Hmmmmm.

That almost sounds like it should go to the heads of our world governments.

Guess it's time for me to quit monkeying around.

(But I like to include the following "fine print" about ways to find more stories.)
**************************

This is part of a series of postings of stories under the category, "Keeping the Public in Public Domain."  The idea behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the authors and their immediate heirs were compensated.  I feel strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the 20th century.  My own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public Domain I decided to share stories from them.  I hope you enjoy discovering new stories.  

At the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an audience.  Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing of Public Domain stories will not occur that week.  This is a return to my regular posting of a research project here.  (Don't worry, this isn't dry research, my research is always geared towards future storytelling to an audience.)  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my other postings as often as I can manage it.

Other Public Domain story resources I recommend-

• There are many online resources for Public Domain stories, maybe none for folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection.  I have long recommended it and continue to do so.  He has loaded Stith Thompson's Motif Index into his server as a database so you can search the whole 6 volumes for whatever word or expression you like by pressing one key. http://folkmasa.org/motiv/motif.htm

• You may have noticed I'm no longer certain Dr. Perez has the largest database, although his offering the Motif Index certainly qualifies for those of us seeking specific types of stories.  There's another site, FairyTalez claiming to be the largest, with "over 2000 fairy tales, folktales, and fables" and they are "fully optimized for phones, tablets, and PCs", free and presented without ads.
  
  Between those two sites, there is much for story-lovers, but as they say in infomercials, "Wait, there's more!"

The email list for storytellers, Storytell, discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional suggestions:            

         - David K. Brown - http://people.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html

         - Karen Chace - http://karenchace.blogspot.com/search?q=public+domain

         - Richard Martin - http://www.tellatale.eu/tales_page.html

         - Spirit of Trees - http://spiritoftrees.org/featured-folktales

         - Story-Lovers - http://www.story-lovers.com/ is now only accessible through the Wayback Machine, described below, but Jackie Baldwin's wonderful site lives on there, fully searchable manually (the Google search doesn't work), at https://archive.org/ .  It's not easy, but go to Story-lovers.com snapshot for October 22 2016  and you can click on SOS: Searching Out Stories to scroll down through the many story topics and click on the story topic that interests you.

       - Tim Sheppard - http://www.timsheppard.co.uk/story/storylinks.html

       - World of Tales - http://www.worldoftales.com/ 

     
You're going to find many of the links on these sites have gone down, BUT go to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find some of these old links.  Tim's site, for example, is so huge probably updating it would be a full-time job.  In the case of Story-Lovers, it's great that Jackie Baldwin set it up to stay online as long as it did after she could no longer maintain it.  Possibly searches maintained it.  Unfortunately Storytell list member, Papa Joe is on both Tim Sheppard's site and Story-Lovers, but he no longer maintains his old Papa Joe's Traveling Storytelling Show website and his Library (something you want to see!) is now only on the Wayback Machine.  It took some patience working back through claims of snapshots but finally in December of 2006 it appears!

Somebody as of this writing whose stories can still be found by his website is the late Chuck Larkin - http://chucklarkin.com/stories.html.  I prefer to list these sites by their complete address so they can be found by the Wayback Machine, a.k.a. Archive.org, when that becomes the only way to find them.

You can see why I recommend these to you. Have fun discovering even more stories!

The EU and How It Will Affect EVERYBODY

As a storyteller,I know it might sound like I'm crying "Wolf!", but 

as a librarian the tiny aggravation in our Inboxes before on the EU 

policies were just a warm-up to a truly Internet breaking policy that 

affects the entire Internet.   

Today I received this (my own comments follow), also I put in bold 

type the part affecting everybody:  

   *This is terrible:* The EU Parliament just caved in to giant 

corporations and passed a massive overhaul of copyright law that 

threatens to ruin the Internet as we know it.    The Parliament 

approved the requirements for taxes on hyperlinks and censorship 

upload  filters for any website that publishes content. 

1 If these policies become law, websites like Reddit and Wikipedia 

could be wiped out entirely.  And it would pave the way for similar 

policies here at home.   But the good news is that the EU Council 

gets its say, and we're going to make sure these devastating policies 

are rejected.

OpenMedia is pressuring EU member states to stand up to corporate 

interests and vote  down the Link Tax and Censorship Machines for 

good. Will you donate to help our efforts?   

https://act.openmedia.org/stl-vote-sbs?src=162909  

The Link Tax would affect not just Europe, but the entire Internet 

ecosystem. Requiring websites to use automated content-filtering 

technology would cost millions of dollars and thousands of manpower 

hours, likely decimating small online businesses and startups. 

2   This legislation stems from pressure from gigantic publishers who 

would rather destroy the free and open Internet than admit their 

business models are obsolete. They want Google and other data 

aggregators to pay up when they link to original sources-but that 

means that we'd also have to pay, changing the way we share 

information with each other. 

3   And the legislation also calls for content sites to have YouTube-

style upload filters.  But most sites don't have the manpower or 

financial resources of YouTube, which paid tens  of millions of 

dollars to put its filter in place. These Censorship Machine 

requirements will put smaller sites out of business for good. 

We've seen the effect that Europe's new  privacy requirements have 

had on websites we use here at home-dozens of new terms of  service 

agreements have come through our email inboxes.  That's why it's 

essential that  the entire world become involved in the fight against 

the EU's new copyright legislation.   And as a global organization 

with campaigners around the world, OpenMedia is uniquely suited to 

take up the fight. 

************************************ 

When this came up earlier I posted on storytelling sites what I could 

find about the  EU Council.  A Canadian storyteller who is also a 

librarian, Elinor Benjamin, added "I managed to harvest all the email 

addresses from the site so I could send one message to all of them - 

freely adapted from Lois' point. Here they are if anyone wants to do 

the same. . .  

francis.zammitdimech@europarl.europa.eu
emil.radev@europarl.europa.eu
pavel.svoboda@europarl.europa.eu
sylvia-yvonne.kaufmann@europarl.europa.eu
enrico.gasbarra@europarl.europa.eu
mady.delvaux-stehres@europarl.europa.eu
tadeusz.zwiefka@europarl.europa.eu
antonio.marinhoepinto@europarl.europa.eu
jozsef.szajer@europarl.europa.eu"  

Please consider how you, too, might respond before the EU Council 

takes steps affecting all of us whether we have a website or not, 

since we all use the internet. 

LoiS(hocked and you should be, too)

Along Came Anansi

I understand spiders creep a lot of people out.  One of my daughters is definitely an arachniphobe.  At the same time I know many wonderful stories about Anansi the spider and love using my easily made puppet.  Ages ago I lost the first one, but knew I could easily replace it.  Take a pair of cloth garden gloves and cut off three fingers on one glove.  Sew the extra fingers in gaps between the thumb and fingers for one of the cut fingers and sew the other two just past the little finger.  Stuff them.  It's up to you if it's easier to stuff them before or after attaching.  The head is a ball that fits in the top of the glove hand.  Add a ribbon for a necktie and eyes.  Yes, one of the buttons on my Anansi is loose.  At the moment it gives him "personality", but may eventually need further work.

An example of a past program

I thought of Anansi because it's almost time for spiders to be coming in to houses and trying to find ways to get through the winter.  Here are some facts about why you might be wise to carefully permit it:  "4 reasons why we should learn to live with spiders."  That first one, especially about eating mosquitoes, has always made me treat spiders with respect.  There are also many spider stories in Native American folklore from Grandmother Spider among the Southwestern nations to what is often a  trickster, Iktomi, for the Plains people.  Wikipedia goes international with its Cultural depictions of spiders, which takes you all over the world.  The African section mentions the name varies, and is sometimes Ananse, or even Aunt Nancy when those tales were brought by African slaves over to this hemisphere. 

I have spider tales from all over, including when I've worked in Jamaica, but most are not in Public Domain.  Does that mean I can't tell them?  Dunberidiculous!  Folk tales are meant to travel farther than a spider swinging on a web's strand.  We can re-tell them in our own way and also send people to the many books where others have shared their stories, art, and living with spiders. 

Daudet - The Last Lesson in French - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

As schools start up again, imagine being suddenly told you could no longer speak the language you normally speak!  This has happened at times.  Here in the U.S., when many Native American children were shipped off to "Indian" boarding schools in the late 19th and early 20th century, it almost resulted in the loss of those languages.  (There's a lot more to say than the Wikipedia link.  Search using the term "Indian boarding schools."  Here in Michigan the topic is in The Tree That Never Dies.)  Even today some are told they may not use American Sign Language, although much less than in the past.  To return to the idea of being told your language was forbidden, imagine the northeastern U.S. being told French only or, vice versa, Quebecois told no French.  In the southwest or Mexico it would be Spanish or English being forbidden.

Today's story is by Alphonse Daudet, a French author not from Alsace-Lorraine where this story is set, even though he tells it as if it was a memory from his childhood.  I'll say more later, but it's true that area has been at times French and at other times German depending on who was controlling the area over the centuries and various wars.

My copy comes from Child Life in Many Lands, a 1911 textbook meant as a Third Reader.  I mention the textbook along with others in my One-Room Schoolteacher program.  As a result it begins with vocabulary words.

 

I found the Wikipedia article on Daudet interesting, especially how he began as a teacher, only to find it intolerable and claimed for months afterwards "he would wake with horror, thinking he was still among his unruly pupils", but used it in his writing.  The story's certainly realistic enough and also re-tells easily.  This happened repeatedly over the centuries in the area where he set it, especially when he tells about it during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, but also in the two major wars of the twentieth century.

Daudet was primarily a novelist and sometimes wrote for children.  It took detective work to find the story originated in Contes du Lundi (1873; English: The Monday Tales, 1900; short stories) .  While searching I found a teacher's lesson using the story to raise many questions and ideas about the importance of language and cultural identity.  I also found an article on this short story from the National Council of the Teachers of English which explained Daudet was so nearsighted he wasn't a soldier during the war, but did observe the area and the times while serving in the French National Guard and used it in many of his books.

May the 2018-2019 school year be a good one for you.  And now for something called in English, "the fine print."
**************************

This is part of a series of postings of stories under the category, "Keeping the Public in Public Domain."  The idea behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the authors and their immediate heirs were compensated.  I feel strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the 20th century.  My own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public Domain I decided to share stories from them.  I hope you enjoy discovering new stories.  

At the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an audience.  Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing of Public Domain stories will not occur that week.  This is a return to my regular posting of a research project here.  (Don't worry, this isn't dry research, my research is always geared towards future storytelling to an audience.)  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my other postings as often as I can manage it.

Other Public Domain story resources I recommend-

• There are many online resources for Public Domain stories, maybe none for folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection.  I have long recommended it and continue to do so.  He has loaded Stith Thompson's Motif Index into his server as a database so you can search the whole 6 volumes for whatever word or expression you like by pressing one key. http://folkmasa.org/motiv/motif.htm

• You may have noticed I'm no longer certain Dr. Perez has the largest database, although his offering the Motif Index certainly qualifies for those of us seeking specific types of stories.  There's another site, FairyTalez claiming to be the largest, with "over 2000 fairy tales, folktales, and fables" and they are "fully optimized for phones, tablets, and PCs", free and presented without ads.
  
  Between those two sites, there is much for story-lovers, but as they say in infomercials, "Wait, there's more!"

The email list for storytellers, Storytell, discussed Online Story Sources and came up with these additional suggestions:            

         - David K. Brown - http://people.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html

         - Karen Chace - http://karenchace.blogspot.com/search?q=public+domain

         - Richard Martin - http://www.tellatale.eu/tales_page.html

         - Spirit of Trees - http://spiritoftrees.org/featured-folktales

         - Story-Lovers - http://www.story-lovers.com/ is now only accessible through the Wayback Machine, described below, but Jackie Baldwin's wonderful site lives on there, fully searchable manually (the Google search doesn't work), at https://archive.org/ .  It's not easy, but go to Story-lovers.com snapshot for October 22 2016  and you can click on SOS: Searching Out Stories to scroll down through the many story topics and click on the story topic that interests you.

       - Tim Sheppard - http://www.timsheppard.co.uk/story/storylinks.html

       - World of Tales - http://www.worldoftales.com/ 

     
You're going to find many of the links on these sites have gone down, BUT go to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find some of these old links.  Tim's site, for example, is so huge probably updating it would be a full-time job.  In the case of Story-Lovers, it's great that Jackie Baldwin set it up to stay online as long as it did after she could no longer maintain it.  Possibly searches maintained it.  Unfortunately Storytell list member, Papa Joe is on both Tim Sheppard's site and Story-Lovers, but he no longer maintains his old Papa Joe's Traveling Storytelling Show website and his Library (something you want to see!) is now only on the Wayback Machine.  It took some patience working back through claims of snapshots but finally in December of 2006 it appears!

Somebody as of this writing whose stories can still be found by his website is the late Chuck Larkin - http://chucklarkin.com/stories.html.  I prefer to list these sites by their complete address so they can be found by the Wayback Machine, a.k.a. Archive.org, when that becomes the only way to find them.

You can see why I recommend these to you. Have fun discovering even more stories!