By this time the American short-story had crossed to England and found in Robert Louis Stevenson an artist who could handle it with consummate skill. He passed it on a more finished and polished article than when he received it, because by a long course of self-training he had become a master in the use of words. His stories remind one of Hawthorne because there is generally in them some underlying moral question, some question of human action, something concerning right and wrong. But they also have another characteristic which is more obvious to the average reader--their frank romance. By romance is meant happenings either out of the usual course of events, such as the climax of _Lochinvar_, or events that cannot occur. The latest stage in the development of the short-story is due to Rudyard Kipling, who has made it generally more terse, has filled it with interest in the highest degree, has found new local color, chiefly in India, and has given it virility and power. His subject matter is, in the main, interesting to all kinds of readers. His stories likewise fulfill all the requirements of the definition. Being a living genius he is constantly showing new sides of his ability, his later stories being psychologic. His writings fall into numerous groups--soldier tales; tales of machinery; of animals; of the supernatural; of native Indian life; of history; of adventure;--the list could be prolonged. Sometimes they are frankly tracts, sometimes acute analyses of the working of the human mind. So in the course of a little less than a century there has grown to maturity a new kind of short narrative identified with American Literature and the American people, exhibiting the foremost traits of the American character, and written by a large number of authors of different rank whose work, of a surprisingly high average of technical excellence, appears chiefly in the magazines. II FORMS Though the short-story has achieved a normal or general form of straightforward narrative, as in Kipling's _An Habitation Enforced_ or Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews' _Amici_, yet it exhibits many variations in presentation. Sometimes it is a series of letters as in James' _A Bundle of Letters_, sometimes a group of narrative, letters, and telegrams as in Thomas Bailey Aldrich's _Marjorie Daw_; again, a letter and a paragraph as in Henry Cuyler Bunner's _A Letter and a Paragraph_, or a gathering of letters, telegrams, newspaper clippings, and advertisements as Bunner and Matthews' _Documents in the Case_. Again it may be told in the first person as in Stevenson's _Pavilion on the Links_, or in the third person as in Kipling's _The Bridge Builders_. Yet again it may be a conundrum as Stockton's famous _The Lady or the Tiger_!