THE READERS'S LIBRARY THE GREAT ENGLISH SHORT-STORY WRITERS VOL. I WITH INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS BY WILLIAM J. DAWSON AND CONINGSBY W. DAWSON MCMX ACKNOWLEDGMENT To the publishers and authors who have courteously permitted the use of copyrighted material in these two volumes, a word of grateful acknowledgment is hereby given by the editors. CONTENTS CHAP. I. THE EVOLUTION OF THE SHORT-STORY II. THE APPARITION OF MRS. VEAL. By Daniel Defoe (1661-1731) III. THE MYSTERIOUS BRIDE. By James Hogg (1770-1835) IV. THE DEVIL AND TOM WALKER. By Washington Irving (1783-1859) V. DR. HEIDEGGER'S EXPERIMENT. By Nathaniel Hawthorne (1807-1864) VI. THE PURLOINED LETTER. By Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) VII. RAB AND HIS FRIENDS. By Dr. John Brown (1810-1882) VIII. THE BOOTS AT THE HOLLY-TREE INN. By Charles Dickens (1812-1870) IX. A STORY OF SEVEN DEVILS. By Frank R. Stockton. (1834-1902) X. A DOG'S TALE. By Mark Twain (1835) XI. THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT. By Bret Harte (1839-1902) XII. THE THREE STRANGERS. By Thomas Hardy (1840) XIII. JULIA BRIDE. By Henry James (1843) XIV. A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT. By Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) INDEX The Evolution of the Short-Story I The short-story commenced its career as a verbal utterance, or, as Robert Louis Stevenson puts it, with "the first men who told their stories round the savage camp-fire." It bears the mark of its origin, for even to-day it is true that the more it creates the illusion of the speaking-voice, causing the reader to listen and to see, so that he forgets the printed page, the better does it accomplish its literary purpose. It is probably an instinctive appreciation of this fact which has led so many latter-day writers to narrate their short-stories in dialect. In a story which is communicated by the living voice our attention is held primarily not by the excellent deposition of adjectives and poise of style, but by the striding progress of the plot; it is the plot, and action in the plot, alone which we remember when the combination of words which conveyed and made the story real to us has been lost to mind. "Crusoe recoiling from the foot-print, Achilles shouting over against the Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian running with his fingers in his ears; these are each culminating moments, and each has been printed on the mind's eye for ever."[1] [Footnote 1: A Gossip on Romance, from _Memories and Portraits_, by R.L. Stevenson.]