of the _conte_. For the short story crossed the Channel by means of Guy de Maupassant, and out of it arose on this side for a brief decade or so a wonderful wealth of art. The short stories of Kipling are by no means the only pebbles on the beach. In fact, never even in France itself was there such variety of theme and treatment. The successful short stories of the period are of all sorts and conditions. To exemplify as briefly as possible this variety is perhaps closer to my purpose than to waste time in proving such obvious facts as the anxious endeavours of all these writers to raise their work to the artistic elevation demanded of the short story, or their strenuous struggle to attain a suitable style and treatment for their themes. [10] Frederick Wedmore in _On Books and Arts_ (1899) discusses the short story as a distinct artistic medium. It can never be a ‘novel in a nutshell.’ Numerous examples of their art at once crowd the mind, such as Ernest Dowson’s _Dying of Francis Donne_, Max Beerbohm’s _Happy Hypocrite_, Frederick Wedmore’s tender _Orgeas and Miradou_, Arthur Symons’s _Death of Peter Waydelin_, the works of Hubert Crackanthorpe, or the fantastic tales of Arthur Machen, or Eric Count Stenbock’s[11] _Studies of Death_. H. D. Lowry, though of Henley’s young men, works at the same art of studies in sentiment in his _Women’s Tragedies_. So does Mr. G. S. Street in his _Episodes_ and George Egerton in her _Discords and Keynotes_. Among the others who deliberately tried to write the short story as an artistic theme at that period and who were at the same time in the movement can be mentioned Henry Harland, Rudolf Dircks in his _Verisimilitudes_, Richard Le Gallienne, Kenneth Grahame, Percy Hemingway in his _Out of Egypt_, etc. Then we have men like R. B. Cunninghame Graham and H. W. Nevinson, clearly influenced by the movement and writing alongside of it of the ends of the earth they have visited. The former, for example, in a short story like _Aurora La Cujiñi_ (Smithers, 1898) clearly reflects the influences of this period which gloried in the abnormal in Art. Known as a socialist of courage, Mr. Graham, whose name betrays his origin, has also visited many of the exotic places of the world. In his able book _Mogreb-el-Acksa_ he has given us vignettes of Morocco that are unsurpassed; in his volume _Success_ he has told us of those Spanish-speaking races of South America, of the tango, and the horses of the pampas, and the estancias he knows so well. In _Aurora La Cujiñi_ we have a vignette of Seville so realistic that we almost believe that one is justified in considering that there is just enough motive in it to vivify it with the quickening touch of the short storyteller’s wand. It is slow in starting, but when this motive comes suddenly at the end we are almost left breathless, realising that everything that went before was but a slow, ruthless piling up of local colour. It is all done with such