THE STRUCTURE OF THE SHORT-STORY
Only One Best Way to Construct a Short-Story--Problems of Short-Story
Construction--The Initial Position--The Terminal Position--Poe's
Analysis of "The Raven"--Analysis of "Ligeia"--Analysis of "The
Prodigal Son"--Style Essential to the Short-Story.
=Only One Best Way to Construct a Short-Story.=--Since the aim of a
short-story is to produce a single narrative effect with the greatest
economy of means that is consistent with the utmost emphasis, it
follows that, given any single narrative effect--any theme, in other
words, for a short-story--there can be only one best way to construct
the story based upon it. A novel may be built in any of a multitude of
ways; and the selection of method depends more upon the temperament
and taste of the author than upon inherent logical necessity. But in a
short-story the problem of the author is primarily structural; and
structure is a matter of intellect instead of a matter of temperament
and taste. Now, the intellect differs from the taste in being an
absolute and general, rather than an individual and personal, quality
of mind. There is no disputing matters of taste, as the Latin proverb
justly says; but matters of intellect may be disputed logically until
a definite decision is arrived at. Hence, although the planning of a
novel must be left to the individual author, the structure of a
short-story may be considered as a matter impersonal and absolute,
like the working out of a geometrical proposition.
=Problems of Short-Story Construction.=--The initial problem of the
writer of short-stories is to find out by intellectual means the one
best way of constructing the story that he has to tell; and, in order
to solve this problem, there are many questions he must take up and
decide. First of all, he must conserve the need for economy of means
by considering how many, or rather, _how few_, characters are
necessary to the narrative, how few distinct events he can get along
with, and how narrow is the compass of time and place within which he
may compact his material. He must next consider all the available
points of view from which to tell the given story, and must decide
which of them will best subserve his purpose. Next, in deciding on his
means of delineating characters, of representing action, of employing
setting, he must be guided always by the endeavor to strike a just
balance between (on the one hand) the greatest economy of means and
(on the other) the utmost emphasis. And finally, to conserve the
latter need, he must, in planning the narrative step by step, be
guided by the principle of emphasis in all its phases.
=The Initial Position.=--The natural emphasis of the initial and the
terminal position is, in the short-story, a matter of prime
importance. The opening of a perfectly constructed tale fulfills two
purposes, one of which is intellectual and the other emotional.
Intellectually, it indicates clearly to the reader whether, in the
narrative that follows, the element of action, or of character, or of
setting is to be predominant,--in other words, which of the three
sorts of narrative effect the story is intended to produce.
Emotionally, it strikes the key-note and suggests the tone of the
entire story. Edgar Allan Poe, in his greatest tales, planned his
openings infallibly to fulfill these purposes. He began a story of
setting with description; a story of character with a remark made by,
or made about, the leading actor; and a story of action with a
sentence pregnant with potential incident. Furthermore, he conveyed in
his very first sentence a subtle sense of the emotional tone of the
entire narrative.
In opening his short-stories, Hawthorne showed himself far inferior to
his great contemporary. Only unawares did he occasionally hit upon the
inevitable first sentence. Often he wasted time at the beginning by
writing an unnecessary introduction; and frequently he began upon the
wrong track, by suggesting character at the outset of a story of
action, or suggesting setting at the outset of a story of character.
The tale of "The Gentle Boy," for instance, which was one of the first
to attract attention to his genius, begins unnecessarily with an
historical essay of three pages; and it is not until the narrative is
well on its way that the reader is able to sense the one thing that it
is all about.
Mr. Rudyard Kipling, in his earlier stories, employed a method of
opening which is worthy of careful critical consideration. In "Plain
Tales from the Hills" and the several volumes that followed it within
the next few years, his habit was to begin with an expository essay,
filling the space of a paragraph or two, in which he stated the theme
of the story he was about to tell. "This is what the story is to deal
with," he would say succinctly: "Now listen to the tale itself." This
method is extremely advantageous on the score of economy. It gives the
reader at the outset an intellectual possession of the theme; and
knowing from the very beginning the effect designed to be produced, he
can follow with the greater economy of attention the narrative that
produces it. But, on the other hand, the method is inartistic, in that
it presents explicitly what might with greater subtlety be conveyed
implicitly, and subverts the mood of narrative by obtruding
exposition. In his later stories, Mr. Kipling has discarded for the
most part this convenient but too obvious expedient, and has revealed
his theme implicitly through the narrative tenor and emotional tone of
his initial sentences. That the latter method of opening is the more
artistic will be seen at once from a comparison of examples. This is
the beginning of "Thrown Away," an early story:--
"To rear a boy under what parents call the 'sheltered life system' is,
if the boy must go into the world and fend for himself, not wise.
Unless he be one in a thousand he has certainly to pass through many
unnecessary troubles; and may, possibly, come to extreme grief simply
from ignorance of the proper proportions of things.
"Let a puppy eat the soap in the bath-room or chew a newly blacked
boot. He chews and chuckles until, by and by, he finds out that
blacking and Old Brown Windsor made him very sick; so he argues that
soap and boots are not wholesome. Any old dog about the house will
soon show him the unwisdom of biting big dogs' ears. Being young, he
remembers and goes abroad, at six months, a well-mannered little beast
with a chastened appetite. If he had been kept away from boots, and
soap, and big dogs till he came to the trinity full-grown and with
developed teeth, consider how fearfully sick and thrashed he would be!
Apply that notion to the 'sheltered life,' and see how it works. It
does not sound pretty, but it is the better of two evils.
"There was a Boy once who had been brought up under the 'sheltered
life' theory; and the theory killed him dead...."
And so on. At this point, after the expository introduction, the
narrative proper begins. Consider now the opening of a later story,
"Without Benefit of Clergy." This is the first sentence:--"But if it
be a girl?" Notice how much has already been said and suggested in
this little question of six words. Surely the beginning of this story
is conducted with the better art.
The expository opening was copied from Mr. Kipling by O. Henry and
established by this writer as a fashion which is still continued by
contributors to American magazines. But a popular expedient is not
necessarily to be regarded as a permanent contribution to the methods
of fiction; and Mr. Kipling, in his later stories, is a finer artist
than Miss Edna Ferber or any other of the many imitators of O. Henry.
=The Terminal Position.=--But, in the structure of the short-story,
the emphasis of the terminal position is an even more important
matter. In this regard again Poe shows his artistry, in stopping at
the very moment when he has attained completely his preëstablished
design. His conclusions remain to this day unsurpassed in the sense
they give of absolute finality. Hawthorne was far less firm in
mastering the endings of his stories. His personal predilection for
pointing a moral to adorn his tale led him frequently to append a
passage of homiletic comment which was not bone of the bone and blood
of the blood of the narrative itself. In the chapter on emphasis, we
have already called attention to Guy de Maupassant's device of
periodic structure, by means of which the solution of the story is
withheld till the concluding sentences. This exceedingly effective
expedient, however, is applicable only in the sort of story wherein
the element of surprise is inherent in the nature of the theme. In no
other single feature of construction may the work of the inexperienced
author be so readily detected as in the final passage of his story.
Mr. Kipling's "Lispeth" (the first of "Plain Tales from the Hills"),
which was written at a very early age, began perfectly [the first word
is "She"] and proceeded well; but when he approached his conclusion,
the young author did not know where to stop. His story really ended at
the words, "And she never came back"; for at that point his
pre-established design had been entirely effected. But instead of
closing there, he appended four unnecessary paragraphs, dealing with
the subsequent life of his heroine--all of which was, to use his own
familiar phrase, "another story." Poe and de Maupassant would not have
made this mistake; and neither would Mr. Kipling after he had grown
into mastery of artistic method. In one of the most celebrated stories
of O. Henry, entitled "The Gift of the Magi", the author made the
technical mistake of appending a superfluous paragraph after his
logical pattern had been completed.
=Poe's Analysis of "The Raven."=--In his very interesting paper on
"The Philosophy of Composition," Edgar Allan Poe outlined step by step
the intellectual processes by which he developed the structure of "The
Raven" and fashioned a finished poem from a preconceived effect. It is
greatly to be regretted that he did not write a similar essay
outlining in detail the successive stages in the construction of one
of his short-stories. With his extraordinarily clear and analytic
intellect, he fashioned his plots with mathematical precision. So
rigorously did he work that in his best stories we feel that the
removal of a sentence would be an amputation. He succeeded absolutely
in giving his narrative the utmost emphasis with the greatest economy
of means.
=Analysis of "Ligeia."=--If we learn through and through how a single
perfect story is constructed, we shall have gone far toward
understanding the technic of story-building as a whole. Let us
therefore analyze one of Poe's short-stories--following in the main
the method which he himself pursued in his analysis of "The Raven"--in
order to learn the successive steps by which any excellent short-story
may be developed from its theme. Let us choose "Ligeia" for the
subject of this study, because it is very widely known, and because
Poe himself considered it the greatest of his tales. Let us see how,
starting with the theme of the story, Poe developed step by step the
structure of his finished fabric; and how, granted his preëstablished
design, the progress of his plan was in every step inevitable.[8]
The theme of "Ligeia" was evidently suggested by those lines from
Joseph Glanvill which, quoted as a motto for the story, are thrice
repeated during the course of the narrative:--
"And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the
mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will,
pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield
himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the
weakness of his feeble will."
Poe recognized, with the English moralist, that the human will is
strong and can conquer many of the ills that flesh is heir to. If it
were still stronger, it could do more mighty things; and if it were
_very much_ stronger, it is even conceivable that it might vanquish
death, its last and sternest foe. Now it was legitimate for the
purposes of fiction to imagine a character endowed with a will strong
enough to conquer death; and a striking narrative effect could
certainly be produced by setting forth this moral conquest. This,
then, became the purpose of the story: to exhibit a character with a
superhuman will, and to show how, by sheer force of volition, this
person conquered death.
Having thus decided on his theme, the writer of the story was
first forced to consider how many, or rather _how few_, characters
were necessary to the narrative. One, at least, was obviously
essential,--the person with the superhuman will. For esthetic reasons
Poe made this character a woman, and called her Ligeia; but it is
evident that _structurally_ the story would have been the same if he
had made the character a man. The resultant narrative would have been
different in mood and tone; but it would not have been different in
structure. Given this central character, it was not perhaps evident
at first that another person was needed for the tale. But in all
stories which set forth an extraordinary being, it is necessary to
introduce an ordinary character to serve as a standard by which the
unusual capabilities of the central figure may be measured.
Furthermore, in stories which treat of the miraculous, it is
necessary to have at least one eye-witness to the extraordinary
circumstances beside the person primarily concerned in them. Hence
another character was absolutely needed in the tale. This second
person, moreover, had to be intimately associated with the heroine,
for the two reasons already considered. The most intimate relation
imaginable was that of husband and wife; he must therefore be the
husband of Ligeia. Beside these two people,--a woman of superhuman
will, and her husband, a man of ordinary powers,--no other character
was necessary; and therefore Poe did not (and _could not_, according
to the laws of the short-story) introduce another. The Lady of
Tremaine, as we shall see later on, is not, technically considered, a
character.
The main outline of the story could now be plotted. Ligeia and her
husband must be exhibited to the reader; and then, in her husband's
presence, Ligeia must conquer death by the vigor of her will. But in
order to do this, she must first die. If she merely exerted her will
to ward off the attacks of death, the reader would not be convinced
that her recovery had been accomplished by other than ordinary means.
She must die, therefore, and must afterwards resurrect herself by a
powerful exertion of volition. The reader must be fully convinced that
she did really die; and therefore, before her resurrection, she must
be laid for some time in the grave. The story, then, divided itself
into two parts: the first, in which Ligeia was alive, terminated with
her death; and the second, in which she was dead, ended with her
resurrection.
Having thus arrived at the main outline of his plot, Poe was next
forced to decide on the point of view from which the story should be
told. Under the existing conditions, any one of three distinct points
of view may have seemed, at the first glance, available: that of the
chief character, that of the secondary character, and that of an
external omniscient personality. But only a little consideration was
necessary to show that only one of these three could successfully be
employed. Obviously, the story could not be narrated by Ligeia: for it
would be awkward to let an extraordinary woman discourse about her own
unusual qualities; and furthermore, she could hardly narrate a story
involving as one of its chief features her stay among the dead without
being expected to tell the secrets of her prison-house. It was
likewise impossible to tell the tale from the point of view of an
external omniscient personality. In order that the final and
miraculous incident might seem convincing, it had to be narrated not
impersonally but personally, not externally but by an eye-witness.
Therefore, the story must, of course, be told by the husband of
Ligeia.
At this point the main outline was completed. It then became
necessary for Poe to plan the two divisions of the story in detail.
In the first part, no action was necessary, and very little
attention had to be paid to setting. It was essential that all of
the writer's stress should be laid on the element of character; for
the sole purpose of this initial division of the story must be to
produce upon the reader an extremely emphatic impression of the
extraordinary personality of Ligeia. As soon as the reader could be
sufficiently impressed with the force of her character, she must be
made to die; and the first part of the story would be finished. But
at this point Poe was obliged to choose between the direct and the
indirect means of delineating character. Should Ligeia be depicted
directly by her husband, or indirectly, through her own speech? In
other words, should this first half of the story be a description
or a conversation? The matter was easy to decide. The method of
conversation was unavailable; because a dialogue between Ligeia and
her husband would keep the attention of the reader hovering from one
to the other, whereas it was necessary for the purpose of the tale
to focus all of the attention on Ligeia. She must, therefore, be
depicted directly by her husband. Having concluded that he must devote
the entire first half of his story to this description, Poe
employed all his powers to make it adequate and emphatic. The
description must, of course, be largely subjective and suggestive,
and must be pervaded with a sense of something unfathomable about
the person described. In order that (reverting to the language of
Poe's own critical dictum) "his very initial sentence" might "tend
to the outbringing of this effect," the author wrote, "I cannot
for my soul remember how, when, or even precisely where I first
became acquainted with the Lady Ligeia"; and the story was begun.
It was more difficult to handle the second division of the tale,
which was to deal with the period between Ligeia's death and her
resurrection. The main stress of the story now ceased to be laid on
the element of character. The element of action, furthermore, was
subsidiary in the second part of the tale, as it had been already in
the first. All that had to happen was the resurrection of Ligeia;
and this the reader had been forced by the very theme of the
story to foresee. The chief interest in the second part must therefore
lie in determining where and when and how this resurrection was
accomplished. A worthy setting must be found for the culminating
event. Poe could lose no time in preparing a place for his climax;
and therefore he was obliged, as soon as he had laid Ligeia in the
grave, to begin an elaborate description of the stage settings of his
final scene. The place must be wild and weird and arabesque. It must
be worthy to receive a resurrected mortal revisiting the glimpses
of the moon. The place was found, the time--midnight--decided upon:
but the question remained,--_how_ should Ligeia be resurrected?
And here arose almost an insuperable difficulty. Ligeia had been
buried (_must have been_ buried, as we have seen), and her body had
been given to the worms. Yet now she must be revived. And it would not
be sufficient to let her merely walk bodily into the fantastic
apartment where her husband, dream-haunted, was waiting to receive
her; for the point to be emphasized was not so much the mere fact of
her being once more alive, as the fact that she had won her way back
to life by the exertion of her own extraordinary will. The reader must
be shown not only _the result_ of her triumph over death, but _the
very process of the struggle_ through which by sheer volition she
forced her soul back into the bodily life. If only her body were
present, so that the reader could be shown its gradual obsession by
her soul, all would be easily accomplished; but, by the conditions of
the story, her body _could not_ be present: and the difficulty of the
problem was extreme.
But here Poe hit upon a solution of the difficulty. Would not another
dead body do as well? Surely Ligeia could breathe her life into any
discarded female form. Therefore, of course, her husband must marry
again, solely in order that his second wife should die. The Lady
Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine is, therefore, as I have already hinted,
not really a character, but only a necessary adjunct to the final
scene, an indispensable piece of stage property. In order to indicate
this fact, Poe was obliged to abstain carefully from describing her in
detail, and to seek in every possible way to prevent the reader's
attention from dwelling long upon her. Hence, although, in writing the
first part of the story, he devoted several pages to the description
of the heroine, he dismissed the Lady Rowena, in the second part, with
only two descriptive epithets,--"fair-haired and blue-eyed," to
distinguish her briefly from the dark-eyed and raven-haired Ligeia.
With the help of this convenient body, it was easy for Poe to develop
his final scene. The intense struggle of Ligeia's soul to win its way
back to the world could be worked up with enthralling suspense: and
when at last the climax was reached and the husband realized that his
lost love stood living before him, the purpose of the story would be
accomplished, Ligeia's will would have done its work, and there would
be nothing more to tell. Poe wrote, "These are the full, and the
black, and the wild eyes--of my lost love--of the Lady--of the _Lady
Ligeia_": and the story was ended.
For it must be absolutely understood that with whatever may have
happened after that moment of entire recognition this particular story
does not, and cannot, concern itself. Whether in the next moment
Ligeia dies again irrevocably, or whether she lives an ordinary
lifetime and then ultimately dies forever, or whether she remains
alive eternally as a result of the triumph of her will, are questions
entirely beyond the scope of the story and have nothing to do with the
single narrative effect which Poe, from the very outset, was planning
to produce. At no other point does he more clearly display his
mastery than in his choice of the perfect moment at which to end his
story.
It would, of course, be idle to assert that Poe disposed of all the
narrative problems which confronted him while constructing this story
precisely in the order I have indicated. Unfortunately, he never
explained in print the genesis of any of his stories, and we can only
imagine the process of his plans with the aid of his careful analysis
of the development of "The Raven." But I think it has been clearly
shown that the structure of "Ligeia" is at all points inevitably
conditioned by its theme, and that no detail of the structure could be
altered without injuring the effect of the story; and I am confident
that some intellectual process similar to that which has been outlined
must be followed by every author who seeks to construct stories as
perfect in form as Poe's.
=Analysis of "The Prodigal Son."=--The student of short-story
structure is therefore advised to submit several other masterpieces of
the form to a process of intellectual analysis similar to that which
we have just pursued. By so doing he will become impressed with the
_inevitability_ of every structural expedient that is employed in the
best examples of the type. For a further illustration of this
inevitability of structure, let us look for a moment at the parable of
"The Prodigal Son" (Luke xv., beginning with the eleventh verse),
which, although it was written down many centuries ago, fulfills the
modern critical concept of the short-story, in that it produces a
single narrative effect with the greatest economy of means that is
consistent with the utmost emphasis. For the purposes of this study,
let us set aside the religious implications of the parable, and
consider it as an ordinary work of fiction. The story should more
properly be called "The Forgiving Father," rather than "The Prodigal
Son"; because the single narrative effect to be wrought out is the
extent of a father's forgiveness toward his erring children. Two
characters are obviously needed for the tale,--first, a father to
exercise forgiveness, and second, a child to be forgiven. Whether this
child were a son or a daughter would, of course, have no effect on the
mere structure of the story. In the narrative as we know it, the
erring child is a son. In pursuance of the greatest economy of means,
the story might be told with these two characters only, because the
effect to be wrought out is based on the personal relation between
them,--a relation involving no one else. But fatherly forbearance
exercised toward an _only_ child might seem a trait of human weakness
instead of patriarchal strength; and the father's forgiveness will be
greatly accentuated if, beside the prodigal, he has other children
less liable to error. Therefore, in pursuance of the utmost emphasis,
it is necessary to add a third character,--another son who is not
allured into the way of the transgressor. The story must necessarily
be narrated by an external omniscient personality: it must be seen and
told from a point of view aloof and god-like. The father could not tell
it, because the theme of the tale is the beauty of his own character;
and neither of the two sons is in a position to see the story whole
and to narrate it without prejudice. The story opens perfectly, with
the very simple sentence, "A certain man had two sons." Already the
reader knows that he is to be told a story of character (rather than
of action or of setting) concerning three people, the most important
of whom is the certain man who has been mentioned first. Consider, in
passing, how faulty would have been such another opening as this, for
instance,--"Not long ago, in a city of Judea".... Such an initial
sentence would have suggested setting, instead of suggesting
character, as the leading element in the story. Very properly, the
first of the two sons to be singled out specifically is the more
important of the two, the prodigal: "And the younger of them said to
his father, 'Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to
me.'" Thus, in only two sentences, the reader is given the entire
basis of the story. The swift and simple narrative that follows is
masterly in absolute conciseness. The younger son takes his journey
into a far country, wastes his substance in riotous living, begins to
be in want, suffers and repents, and returns to seek the forgiveness
of his father. Wonderfully, beautifully, his father loves and pities
and forgives him: "For this my son was dead and is alive again; he was
lost, and is found." At this point the story would end, if it were
told with only two characters instead of three. But emphasis demands
that the elder son should now make an entirely reasonable objection to
the reception of the prodigal; because the great love which is the
essence of the father's character will shine forth much more brightly
when he overrules the objection. He does so in the same words he had
used in the first moment of emotion: "For this thy brother was dead,
and is alive again; and was lost, and is found." These beautiful
words, which now receive the emphasis of iteration as well as the
emphasis of terminal position, sum up and complete the entire
preëstablished design.
This story, which contains only five hundred words, is a little
masterpiece of structure. It embodies a narrative theme of profound
human import; it exhibits three characters so clearly and completely
drawn that the reader knows them better than he knows many a hero of a
lengthy novel; and it displays an absolute adjustment between economy
and emphasis in its succinct yet touching train of incidents.
Furthermore, it is also, in the English version of the King James
translators, a little masterpiece of style. The words are simple,
homely, and direct. Most of them are of Saxon origin, and the
majority are monosyllabic. Less than half a dozen words in the entire
narrative contain more than two syllables. And yet they are set so
delicately together that they fall into rhythms potent with emotional
effect. How much the story gains from this mastery of prose may be
felt at once by comparing with the King James version parallel
passages from the standard French Bible. The English monosyllabic
refrain, with its touching balance of rhythm, loses nearly all of its
esthetic effect in the French translation: "_Car mon fils, que voici,
était mort, mais il est ressuscité; il était perdu, mais il est
retrouvé._" And that very moving sentence about the elder son, "And he
was angry, and would not go in: therefore came his father out and
entreated him," becomes in the French Bible, "_Mais il se mit en
colère, et ne voulut point entrer; et son père étant sorti, le priait
d'entrer._" No especial nicety of ear is necessary to notice that the
first is greatly written, and the second is not.
=Style Essential to the Short-Story.=--And this leads us to the
general consideration that even a perfectly constructed story will
fail of the uttermost effect unless it be at all points adequately
written. After Poe had, with his intellect, outlined step by step
the structure of "Ligeia," he was obliged to confront a further
problem,--the problem of writing the story with the thrilling and
enthralling harmony of that low, musical language which haunts us
like the echo of a dream. It is one thing to build a story; it is
quite another thing to write it: and in Poe's case it is evident that
an appreciable interval of time must have elapsed between his
accomplishment of the first, and his undertaking of the second,
effort. He built his stories intellectually, in cold blood; he wrote
them emotionally, in esthetic exaltation: and the two moods are so
distinct and mutually exclusive that they must have been successive
instead of coexistent. Some authors build better than they write;
others write better than they build. Seldom, very seldom, is a man
equipped, as Poe was, with an equal mastery of structure and of style.
Yet though unity of form may be attained through structure alone,
unity of mood is dependent mainly upon style. The language should be
pitched throughout in tune with the emotional significance of the
narrative effect to be produced. Any sentence which is tuned out of
harmony will jangle and disrupt the unity of mood, which is as
necessary to a great short-story as it is to a great lyric poem.
Hawthorne, though his structure was frequently at fault, proved the
greatness of his art by maintaining, through sheer mastery of
style, an absolute unity of mood in every story that he undertook.
Mr. Kipling has not always done so, because he has frequently used
language more with manner than with style; but in his best stories,
like "The Brushwood Boy" and "They," there is a unity of tone
throughout the writing that sets them on the plane of highest art.
[8] The analysis of "Ligeia" which follows was first printed in the
_Reader_ for February, 1906. It is here resumed with a few
revisions of detail.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. What are the main points to be considered in constructing a
short-story?
2. Explain the technical importance of the last paragraph, and the
first paragraph, of a short-story.
3. Analyze a great short-story according to the method illustrated in
the foregoing analyses of "Ligeia" and "The Prodigal Son."
SUGGESTED READING
EDGAR ALLAN POE: "The Fall of the House of Usher."
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: "The White Old Maid."
BRET HARTE: "Tennessee's Pardner."
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: "Markheim."
RUDYARD KIPLING: "Without Benefit of Clergy."
KENNETH GRAHAME: "The Roman Road."
F. J. STIMSON: "Mrs. Knollys."
GUY DE MAUPASSANT: "The Necklace."
ALPHONSE DAUDET: "The Last Class."
H. C. BUNNER: "A Sisterly Scheme."
O. HENRY: "A Municipal Report."