These are the folk tales from Dr. Helen Creighton's life journey through the Maritime provinces, collecting songs and ghost stories and old cures and folk tales, Helen serves as our guide, introducing us to storytellers, setting the scene of the telling--and then she lets the person tell it as they told it to her. Some are long, really miraculous folk tales, others are the brief riddle or the tantalizing quick-telling that a folklorist can expect along the way. Helen kept it all. Read as a whole, the reality and intensity of those smaller pieces reveals their value in among the more finished, well-told tales.