50. _The Dark Hour_ (Atlantic Monthly), 51. _A Taste of the Old Boy_ (Collier’s Weekly), and 52. _The Wages of Sin_ (Pictorial Review), by _Wilbur Daniel Steele_. Once more it is necessary to affirm that Wilbur Daniel Steele shares with Mrs. Katharine Fullerton Gerould the distinction of first place among contemporary American short-story artists. I still think that “Ching, Ching, Chinaman” is the best short story that Mr. Steele has yet written, and that its only close rival is “A White Horse Winter,” but “The Dark Hour” I should place third in an anthology of Mr. Steele’s stories, and first in an anthology of American war stories. In its message to the American people it yields in significance only to the best of President Wilson’s state papers, and serves to crystallize the issue before the country in this war as unforgetably as William Vaughn Moody crystallized the war issue less than twenty years ago in his “Ode in Time of Hesitation,” also published in the Atlantic Monthly. In the light of present events, Mr. Steele’s message has only increased in significance. Of the two other stories, “The Wages of Sin” takes its rightful place with the other Urkey Island stories which I have discussed in the past. “A Taste of the Old Boy” is one more war legend for our anthology. 53. _The Bird of Serbia_, by _Julian Street_ (Collier’s Weekly). Repeatedly in the course of this article I have had occasion to point out that the best of the year’s war stories are creating new legends. How a bird in a cage in a little Serbian village may have been the cause of the Great War is persuasively set forth by Mr. Street in this story. The conclusion is one of the best examples of a justifiable surprise ending that I know of, and the human quality of Mr. Street’s characterization renders its inherent improbability psychologically convincing. 54. _The Three Zoölogical Wishes_, by _Booth Tarkington_ (Collier’s Weekly). This is the most amusing study of adolescence that Mr. Tarkington has given us. It has countless subtle touches of observation which quietly build up two remarkably accurate portraits. I regard it as the best of the new series which Mr. Tarkington has been publishing in Collier’s Weekly. 55. _Five Rungs Gone_, by _Albert W. Tolman_ (Youth’s Companion). For many years the most interesting weekly feature of the Youth’s Companion has been the danger story in which the youthful hero escapes from extraordinary peril by virtue of courage and great intellectual ingenuity. Most of these stories are built on a regular formula and cannot claim much literary value. But now and then a situation is so vividly realized, and the situation so logically deduced, that the story has literary justification. And “Five Rungs Gone” is altogether exceptional in this respect.