Among the fifteen stories ranking highest, four happen to be about the American Negro. The increasing representation of this race in brief fiction I observed in my introduction to _O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories_ of 1925. Of that year Du Bose Heyward’s “Crown’s Bess” and Julia Peterkin’s “Maum Lou” were reprinted; John Matheus’s “Fog,” Frederick Tisdale’s “The Guitar,” and Elsie Singmaster’s “Elfie” were mentioned. The volume for 1926 reprinted Arthur Huff Fauset’s “Symphonesque” and Lyle Saxon’s “Cane River.” The present collection offers, first, “Child of God.” “Never,” writes Mrs. Wood, “was the spirit of an age and a people more happily caught than here. The old-time darky and his tales may have been lost in a modern deluge of the nigger minstrel type, that ‘extinct species of a race that never existed’; but he comes back into his own in ‘Child of God’ with his characteristic ideas of a perfect heaven.” That the idea of heaven advanced is Willie’s idea appears to have eluded those who raised a small storm when they read the story in _Harper’s_. The visions Mr. Bradford spreads upon the page with sympathy and naïve simplicity are, of course, the visions vouchsafed to Willie in the few seconds after the trap gave way under his feet and before his body was borne out of jail; just so Willie would have constructed those visions. Added to the dream is something else that is greater art. The supernatural, revealing Willie’s experiences after death, is joined to the human dream so well as to defy detection. Who knows when life was pronounced extinct? What part of Willie’s dream belongs to earth and what to the heaven of his fancy? “There is art, exquisite art, in the joining,” as O. Henry once wrote of another story, and tenuous though the fabric may be, the seam is indiscernible. And how completely the delicately woven stuff covers the hard reality of the green-eyed man’s collapse! That ugly blue face and frothy saliva potently declare that the hangman was neatly punished by Willie’s ghost. “Mr. Bradford is of course the unquestionable find of the year,” writes Mr. Ramsay. “His ‘Child of God’ would perhaps never have been written if Molnar had not shown us in _Liliom_ how interesting it may be to see heaven through a glass very darkly; but it is an amazingly successful transcription into terms of Negro psychology.” The chairman suggests that it be read side by side with Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”--a tale many times reprinted--for testing its indubitable superiority.