The Story Tree was a very, very, very old tree - a thousand years or more old. The reason it was called the Story Tree was because over the past thousand years it had collected a lot of stories. Where do the stories come from, I can hear you ask. Well you see the Story Tree had a secret. What was its secret, I can hear you ask. Well the secret of the Story Tree was that it was a very good listener. Yes, you heard me correctly - the Story Tree was a very good listener. So every day when all the morning birds arrived to sit on the branches of the story tree, they would all tell the Story Tree a story about where they had been and what they had seen. And, being a very good listener, the Story Tree listened to their stories and remembered every detail and every word. And every evening when all the evening birds arrived to sit on the branches of the Story Tree, they would all tell the Story Tree a story about where they had been and what they had seen. Now the Story Tree would store all the stories quite carefully in its branches and leaves and when a bird would land on a branch it would tell the Story Tree a story and then, in return, the Story Tree would give the bird another story. That seems fair, don't you think? So one day I met the Story Tree - in fact I had a cup of tree just under its branches - and the story tree told me some of the stories that the birds had brought to the Story Tree and that it had stored quite carefully in its branches and in its leaves. So each one of the stories in this book is a story that has been told by a bird to the Story Tree because it is a very good listener. And here they are...........
