_The White Old Maid_ _1835_ 131 VI. HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW _The Notary of Périgueux_ _1835_ 145 VII. EDGAR ALLAN POE _The Fall of the House of Usher_ _1839_ 155 VIII. NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS _The Inlet of Peach Blossoms_ _1840–5_ 179 IX. CAROLINE MATILDA STANSBURY KIRKLAND _The Bee-Tree_ _1846_ 195 X. FITZ-JAMES O’BRIEN _What was It? A Mystery_ _1859_ 213 XI. FRANCIS BRET HARTE _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_ _1869_ 231 XII. ALBERT FALVEY WEBSTER _Miss Eunice’s Glove_ _1873_ 247 XIII. BAYARD TAYLOR _Who was She?_ _1874_ 269 XIV. HENRY CUYLER BUNNER _The Love-Letters of Smith_ _1890_ 291 XV. HAROLD FREDERIC _The Eve of the Fourth_ _1897_ 305 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 325 INDEX 327 AMERICAN SHORT STORIES INTRODUCTION I. THE TALE IN AMERICA BEFORE 1835 How few years comprise the history of American literature is strikingly suggested by the fact that so much of it can be covered by the reminiscence of a single man of letters.[1] A life beginning in the ’20’s had actual touch in boyhood with Irving, and seized fresh from the press the romances of Cooper. And if the history of American literature be read more exclusively as the history of literary development essentially American, its years are still fewer. “I perceive,” says a foreign visitor in Austin’s story of _Joseph Natterstrom_, “this is a very young country, but a very old people.”[2] Some critics, indeed, have been so irritated by the spreading of the eagle in larger pretensions as to deprecate entirely the phrase “American literature.” Our literature, they retort, has shown no national, essential difference from the literature of the other peoples using the same language. How these carpers accommodate to their view Thoreau, for instance, is not clear. But waiving other claims, the case might almost be made out from the indigenous growth of one literary form. Our short story, at least, is definitely American.