France with her literary newspapers and artistic tendencies, and the United States with magazines calling incessantly for good short-stories, and with every section of its conglomerate life clamoring to express itself, lead in the production and rank of short-stories. Maupassant and Stevenson and Hawthorne and Poe are the great names in the ranks of short-story writers. The list of present day writers is interminable, and high school students can best acquire a reasonable appreciation of the great work these writers are doing by reading regularly some of the better grade literary magazines. For a comprehensive view of specimens representing the history and development of the short-story, students should have access to Brander Matthews' _The Short Story_, Jessup and Canby's _The Book of the Short-Story_, and Waite and Taylor's _Modern Masterpieces of Short Prose Fiction_. NOTE: [1] _American Short-Stories_, by Charles Sears Baldwin, New York: Longmans, Green, & Company, 1904. QUALITIES OF THE SHORT-STORY It was not until well along in the nineteenth century that any one attempted to define the short-story. The three quotations given here are among the best things that have been spoken on this subject. "The right novella is never a novel cropped back from the size of a tree to a bush, or the branch of a tree stuck into the ground and made to serve for a bush. It is another species, destined by the agencies at work in the realm of unconsciousness to be brought into being of its own kind, and not of another,"—W.D. Howells, _North American Review_, 173:429. "A true short-story is something other and something more than a mere story which is short. A true short-story differs from the novel chiefly in its essential unity of impression. In a far more exact and precise use of the word, a short-story has unity as a novel cannot have it…. A short-story deals with a single character, a single event, a single emotion, or the series of emotions called forth by a single situation.—Brander Matthews, _The Philosophy of the Short-Story_. "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."—Clayton Hamilton, _Materials and Methods of Fiction_. The short-story must always have a compact unity and a direct simplicity. In such stories as Björnson's _The Father_ and Maupassant's _The Piece of String_ this simplicity is equal to that of the anecdote, but in no case can an anecdote possess the dramatic possibilities of these simple short-stories; for a short-story must always have that tensity of emotion that comes only in the crucial tests of life.