Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894), one of the leading wits of American literature, is not at all well known as a short story writer, nor did he write many brief pieces of fiction. His fame rests chiefly on his poems and on the _Breakfast-Table_ books (1858-1860-1872-1890). _Old Ironsides_, _The Last Leaf_, _The Chambered Nautilus_ and _Homesick in Heaven_ are secure of places in the anthologies of the future, while his lighter verse has made him one of the leading American writers of “familiar verse.” Frederick Locker-Lampson in the preface to the first edition of his _Lyra Elegantiarum_ (1867) declared that Holmes was “perhaps the best living writer of this species of verse.” His trenchant attack on _Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions_ (1842) makes us wonder what would have been his attitude toward some of the beliefs of our own day; Christian Science, for example. He might have “exposed” it under some such title as _The Religio-Medical Masquerade_, or brought the batteries of his humor to bear on it in the manner of Robert Louis Stevenson’s fable, _Something In It_: “Perhaps there is not much in it, as I supposed; but there is something in it after all. Let me be thankful for that.” In Holmes’ long works of fiction, Elsie Venner (1861), _The Guardian Angel_ (1867) and _A Mortal Antipathy_ (1885), the method is still somewhat that of the essayist. I have found a short piece of fiction by him in the March, 1832, number of _The New England Magazine_, called _The Début_, signed O.W.H. _The Story of Iris_ in _The Professor at the Breakfast Table_, which ran in _The Atlantic_ throughout 1859, and _A Visit to the Asylum for Aged and Decayed Punsters_ (January, 1861, _Atlantic_) are his only other brief fictions of which I am aware. The last named has been given place in the present selection because it is characteristic of a certain type and period of American humor, although its short story qualities are not particularly strong.