In the following pages a poorly literary approach is made to the Ramayana, and a fairly comprehensive summary of its story is given for the benefit of the young. Though the poem consists of six kandas, (excluding the supplement, the so-called Uttara-kanda of doubtful authencity) the story may, conveniently for our purposes, be divided into three parts. The first part, covering the Bala-kanda and the Ayodhya-kanda, is an intensely human tragedy full of situations which wring our hearts. The second part, covering the Aranya-kanda, the Kishkindha-kanda and the Sundara-kanda is a long romance which takes us into dense forests and distant lands inhabited by strange subhuman or inhuman beings possessing weird powers of changing their shape and size at will. And the third part, covering the Yuddha-kanda is an epic describing a colossal conflict between two great Powers on earth, ---a conflict in the issue of which all beings in the universe, including the high gods in heaven, were interested.