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Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
To the publishers and authors who have courteously permitted the useof copyrighted material in these two volumes, a word of gratefulacknowledgment is hereby given by the editors.
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)
The Evolution of the Short-Story
The short-story commenced its career as a verbal utterance, or, asRobert Louis Stevenson puts it, with "the first men who told theirstories round the savage camp-fire."
It bears the mark of its origin, for even to-day it is true that themore it creates the illusion of the speaking-voice, causing the readerto listen and to see, so that he forgets the printed page, the betterdoes it accomplish its literary purpose. It is probably an instinctiveappreciation of this fact which has led so many latter-day writersto narrate their short-stories in dialect. In a story which iscommunicated by the living voice our attention is held primarily notby the excellent deposition of adjectives and poise of style, but bythe striding progress of the plot; it is the plot, and action in theplot, alone which we remember when the combination of words whichconveyed and made the story real to us has been lost to mind. "Crusoerecoiling from the foot-print, Achilles shouting over against theTrojans, Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian running with hisfingers in his ears; these are each culminating moments, and each hasbeen printed on the mind's eye for ever."[1]
[Footnote 1: A Gossip on Romance, from Memories and Portraits, by
R.L. Stevenson.]
The secondary importance of the detailed language in which an incidentis narrated, when compared with the total impression made by thenaked action contained in the incident, is seen in the case ofballad poetry, where a man may retain a vivid mental picture of thelocalities, atmosphere, and dramatic moments created by Coleridge'sAncient Mariner, or Rossetti's White Ship, and yet be quiteincapable of rep