Romanian tales in which the beasts and the birds explain themselves: why the swallow's tail is forked, how the cuckoo lost her nest, the trial of the animals before God. Moses Gaster was Chief Rabbi of the Sephardi community in England and a folklorist who read Romanian, Slavonic and Hebrew sources together. His notes trace each story back through the Balkans and often to India. Thirty plates of Romanian and Central European painting, from Andreescu to Böhm, follow the same peasant world of field, vineyard and forest that the stories come from.