Stockton never stoops to the burlesque, cynic, or vulgar phases of life to secure amusement. He is grotesque and droll in his manner, and above all always restrained. His literary life is full of sprites and gnomes that frolic before young children and once before mature people. _The Griffin and the Minor Canon_ is a beautiful fairy story lifted from childhood's thought and diction into a mature realm. His humor is plain and simple, cool and keenly calculating. A friendly critic has said of one of his stories, "With a gentle, ceaseless murmur of amusement, and a flickering twinkle of smiles, the story moves steadily on in the calm triumph of its assured and unassailable absurdity, to its logical and indisputable impossibility." This observation is very largely true of all his stories. GENERAL REFERENCES _Frank R. Stockton_, A.T.Q. Couch. "Stockton's Method of Working," _Current Literature_, 32:495. "Criticism," _Atheneum_, 1:532. "Estimate," _Harper's Weekly_, 46:555. COLLATERAL READINGS _The Beeman of Orn, and Other Fanciful Tales_, Frank R. Stockton. _The Lady or the Tiger_, Frank R. Stockton. _Rudder Grange_, Frank R. Stockton. _A Tale of Negative Gravity_, Frank R. Stockton. _The Remarkable Wreck of the Thomas Hyde_, Frank R. Stockton. _His Wife's Deceased Sister_, Frank R. Stockton. _Legend of Sleepy Hollow_, Washington Irving. _Monsieur du Miroir_, Nathaniel Hawthorne. _At the End of the Passage_, Rudyard Kipling. _The Vacant Lot_, Mary Wilkins Freeman. _The Princess Pourquoi_, Margaret Sherwood. _What Was It? A Mystery_, Fitz-James O'Brien. _Wandering Willie's Tale_, Walter Scott. THE PIECE OF STRING[1] _By Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)_ On all the roads about Goderville the peasants and their wives were coming toward the town, for it was market day. The men walked at an easy gait, the whole body thrown forward with every movement of their long, crooked legs, misshapen by hard work, by the bearing down on the plough which at the same time causes the left shoulder to rise and the figure to slant; by the mowing of the grain, which makes one hold his knees apart in order to obtain a firm footing; by all the slow and laborious tasks of the fields. Their starched blue blouses, glossy as if varnished, adorned at the neck and wrists with a bit of white stitchwork, puffed out about their bony chests like balloons on the point of taking flight, from which protrude a head, two arms, and two feet. Some of them led a cow or a calf at the end of a rope. And their wives, walking behind the beast, lashed it with a branch still covered with leaves, to hasten its pace. They carried on their arms great baskets, from which heads of chickens or of ducks were thrust forth. And they walked with a shorter and quicker step than their men, their stiff, lean figures wrapped in scanty shawls pinned over their flat breasts, their heads enveloped in a white linen cloth close to the hair, with a cap over all.