In the plain text version text in italics is enclosed by underscores
(_italics_), small capitals are represented in upper case as in
SMALL CAPS, text in bold is represented as in =text in bold=.
The book cover was modified by the transcriber and has been added to
the public domain.
A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated
variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used
has been kept.
Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.
* * * * *
[Illustration: =Leonid Andreyev=]
SHORT-STORY
MASTERPIECES