THE GOLD BUG Edgar Allan Poe
THE RANSOM OF RED CHIEF O. Henry
THE FRESHMAN FULL-BACK Ralph D. Paine
GALLEGHER Richard Harding Davis
THE JUMPING FROG Mark Twain
THE LADY OR THE TIGER? Frank R. Stockton
THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT Francis Bret Harte
THE REVOLT OF MOTHER Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
MARSE CHAN Thomas Nelson Page
"POSSON JONE'" George W. Cable
OUR AROMATIC UNCLE Henry Cuyler Bunner
QUALITY John Galsworthy
THE TRIUMPH OF NIGHT Edith Wharton
A MESSENGER Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
MARKHEIM Robert Louis Stevenson.




PREFACE

Why must we confine the reading of our children to the older
literary classics? This is the question asked by an ever-
increasing number of thoughtful teachers. They have no wish to
displace or to discredit the classics. On the contrary, they love
and revere them. But they do wish to give their pupils something
additional, something that pulses with present life, that is
characteristic of to-day. The children, too, wonder that, with the
great literary outpouring going on about them, they must always
fill their cups from the cisterns of the past.