THE WEAVER WHO CLAD THE SUMMER. By Harris Merton Lyon (From _The Illustrated Sunday Magazine_) HEART OF YOUTH. By Walter J. Muilenburg (From _The Midland_) THE END OF THE PATH. By Newbold Noyes (From _Every Week_) THE WHALE AND THE GRASSHOPPER. By Seumas O'Brien (From _The Illustrated Sunday Magazine_) IN BERLIN. By Mary Boyle O'Reilly (From _The Boston Daily Advertiser_) THE WAITING YEARS. By Katharine Metcalf Roof (From _The Century Magazine_) ZELIG. By Benjamin Rosenblatt (From _The Bellman_) THE SURVIVORS. By Elsie Singmaster (From _The Outlook_) THE YELLOW CAT. By Wilbur Daniel Steele (From _Harper's Magazine_) THE BOUNTY-JUMPER. By Mary Synon (From _Scribner's Magazine_) THE YEARBOOK OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY FOR 1914 AND 1915 THE ROLL OF HONOR FOR 1914 THE ROLL OF HONOR FOR 1915 MAGAZINE AVERAGES FOR 1915 INDEX OF SHORT STORIES FOR 1914 AND 1915 INTRODUCTION In reaffirming the significant position of the American short story as compared with the English short story, I am more impressed than ever with the leadership maintained by American artists in this literary form. Mr. James Stephens has been criticising us for our curiously negative achievement in novel writing. He has compared the American novelist with the English novelist and found him wanting. He is compelled to deny literary distinction to the American novel, and he makes a sweeping indictment of American fiction in consequence. But does he know the American short story? If you turn to the English magazines, you will find a certain form of _conte_ of narrow range developed to a point of high literary merit in such a paper as the _Nation_ or the _New Statesman_. But if you look for short stories in the literary periodicals, you will not find them, and if you turn to the popular English magazines, you will be amazed at the cheap and meretricious quality of the English short story. It would be idle to dispute about the origin of the short story, for several literatures may claim its birth, but the American short story has been developed as an art form to the point where it may fairly claim a sustained superiority, as different in kind as in quality from the tale or _conte_ of other literatures. It would be difficult to trace the reasons for its specially healthy growth in a soil so idly fertilized as our American reading public, but it is less difficult and far more valuable to trace its development and changing standards from year to year as the field of its interest widens and its technique becomes more and more assured and competent. Accordingly it seems advisable to undertake a study of the American short story from year to year as it is represented in the American periodicals which care most to develop its art and its audiences, and to appraise so far as may be the relative achievement of author and magazine in the successful fulfilment of this aim.