As magazines increase in number, good stories increase but not in equal ratio. The reason, which will commend itself to all readers, is apparent to any reader who has served a term in the editorial office. A story is rejected on one of several counts: it falls below the standard of the magazine; it is not of the type suited to the purpose and the audience of the magazine; it comes at a time when the vaults are overstocked. If superlatively excellent, it may overthrow both the second and third barriers. But, let us say, it is rejected because it departs from type. It may develop a psychological struggle, an adventure of the soul, whereas the periodical to which it is offered prefers stories of physical adventure. Sent back, the script may be bought subsequently by a magazine of repute superior to the first. But make no mistake: the editor paying most to-day has the pick of the market. He has first chance, though he may not pick the best. He may leave ungathered a peach of a story, because he believes his readers like apples or plums. Editor Number Two may observe the fine fibre, the rare bloom, of the rejected fruit and serve it up to the gustatorially discerning. So the good story is salvaged. Stories below standard fall to publications implicitly serving readers of lighter, cheaper fiction. The inferior story, then, also ultimately finds an audience.[B] To read, to estimate, and to extract the superior stories from the inferior combine in a threefold task of increasing difficulty. Seventy-five years ago the stream of literature flowed from England and the European continent to America. Examine the first issue of _Harper’s Magazine_.[C] You will find with few exceptions a collection of reprints. Dickens’s _Household Words_, the _Dublin University Magazine_, _Bentley’s Miscellany_, the _Ladies’ Companion_ and the London _Athenæum_ provide two serials, a long story complete, a brief tale or two, memoirs, comments on authors of the day--Jeffrey, Bowles, Wordsworth, George Sand--and translations from the German, besides other matter of irrelevance to this summary. Lay aside Volume I of _Harper’s_, after observing that the volume continues the practice of the first number, and take down Volume I of _Scribner’s_. Appearing thirty-seven years later[D] and thirty-six years before 1923, it marks the apex of this three-quarter century period. The Table of Contents is practically all-American. There are Brander Matthews, Joel Chandler Harris, Dean N. S. Shaler, Octave Thanet, Margaret Crosby, Sarah Orne Jewett, Thomas Nelson Page, Harold Frederic, H. C. Bunner, Duncan Campbell Scott, “J. S.” of Dale, Professor Adams Sherman Hill, Arlo Bates. There are “Glimpses at the Diary of Gouverneur Morris,” rather than “Memoirs of the Duchess of Orleans” (in the _Harper’s_ of 1850). American periodical literature is established.