Produced by Suzanne Shell, Janet Blenkinship, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net [Illustration: "He looked beyond, through the dying fire, into the succeeding years."] CINDERELLA AND OTHER STORIES BY RICHARD HARDING DAVIS NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1896 _Copyright, 1896,_ By Charles Scribner's Sons. *** _The stories in this volume have appeared in Scribner's Magazine, Harper's Magazine, Weekly, and Young People; and "The Reporter who Made Himself King" also in a volume, the rest of which, however, addressed itself to younger readers._ University Press: JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. CONTENTS Page Cinderella 1 Miss Delamar's Understudy 36 The Editor's Story 76 An Assisted Emigrant 105 The Reporter who Made Himself King 119 CINDERELLA The servants of the Hotel Salisbury, which is so called because it is situated on Broadway and conducted on the American plan by a man named Riggs, had agreed upon a date for their annual ball and volunteer concert, and had announced that it would eclipse every other annual ball in the history of the hotel. As the Hotel Salisbury had been only two years in existence, this was not an idle boast, and it had the effect of inducing many people to buy the tickets, which sold at a dollar apiece, and were good for "one gent and a lady," and entitled the bearer to a hat-check without extra charge. In the flutter of preparation all ranks were temporarily levelled, and social barriers taken down with the mutual consent of those separated by them; the night-clerk so far unbent as to personally request the colored hall-boy Number Eight to play a banjo solo at the concert, which was to fill in the pauses between the dances, and the chambermaids timidly consulted with the lady telegraph operator and the lady in charge of the telephone, as to whether or not they intended to wear hats. And so every employee on every floor of the hotel was working individually for the success of the ball, from the engineers in charge of the electric light plant in the cellar, to the night-watchman on the ninth story, and the elevator-boys who belonged to no floor in particular.