_The author, an Austrian nobleman, was born in Vienna in 1833. After the Italian campaign of 1859, he devoted himself to literature. Popularity, though late, came to him at last. In 1904 Vienna voted him an annual honorary stipend, and gave him a recognition that no Austrian author had received since the time of Grillparzer--he was elected to the Austrian Upper House._ _Von Saar’s position in literature is that of creator of the short story in Austria. His style is stately, calm, dignified, delicate, sympathetic, polished--one of the modern masters, with a profound knowledge of life in all its phases._ _He has written comparatively little--besides his short stories, a few novels, dramas, idyls, occasionally touched, as in “The Stonebreakers,” with a natural, easy, tentative realism. He died in the latter part of 1906._ [Illustration] THE STONEBREAKERS BY FERDINAND VON SAAR Translated by A. M. Reiner. Copyright, 1907, by P. F. Collier & Son. One of the most remarkable feats of civil engineering is the railway across the Semmering, a part of the Noric Alps, forming the borderline between the Duchy of Austria and the green plains of Styria. In these days the impression left upon the mind is not so overpowering, but years ago, when the road was new, travelers must have felt the astonishment and awe of men who see for the first time before their very eyes things believed by them to be impossible. Along the tracks, winding about yawning abysses or deep walls of solid rock, the trains thunder over the dizzy heights of the viaducts, or with shrill whistle disappear into the night of seemingly endless tunnels. Long before Mont Cenis was bored through, or the Isthmus of Suez finished, trains of the Semmering issued from the tunnel and reached level ground, leaving their dangers behind, hurrying onward over the smiling meadows; surprise and awe soon changed to pride in the progress of the times, and the traveling son of the century, leaning back in his seat with half-closed eyes, must often have dreamed of the further marvels to be accomplished in time to come. But few, indeed, ever gave a thought to the thousands who, in the sweat of their brow and exposed to every kind of danger, had blasted the rocks, rolled the boulders, bridged the deep gorges, and, in fact, _created_ that much-admired road that now carries us so easily from the restless, dust-swept metropolis to the shores of the blue Adriatic.