nucleus. Little men in canoes upon sunlit oceans would come floating out
of nothingness, incubating the eggs of prehistoric monsters unawares;
violent conflicts would break out amidst the flower-beds of suburban
gardens; I would discover I was peering into remote and mysterious worlds
ruled by an order logical indeed but other than our common sanity.

The 'nineties was a good and stimulating period for a short-story writer.
Mr. Kipling had made his astonishing advent with a series of little
blue-grey books, whose covers opened like window-shutters to reveal
the dusty sun-glare and blazing colours of the East; Mr. Barrie had
demonstrated what could be done in a little space through the panes of his
_Window in Thrums_. The _National Observer_ was at the climax of
its career of heroic insistence upon lyrical brevity and a vivid finish,
and Mr. Frank Harris was not only printing good short stories by other
people, but writing still better ones himself in the dignified pages of
the _Fortnightly Review. Longman's Magazine_, too, represented a
_clientèle_ of appreciative short-story readers that is now
scattered. Then came the generous opportunities of the _Yellow Book_,
and the _National Observer_ died only to give birth to the _New
Review_. No short story of the slightest distinction went for long
unrecognised. The sixpenny popular magazines had still to deaden down the
conception of what a short story might be to the imaginative limitation of
the common reader--and a maximum length of six thousand words. Short
stories broke out everywhere. Kipling was writing short stories; Barrie,
Stevenson, Frank-Harris; Max Beerbohm wrote at least one perfect one, "The
Happy Hypocrite"; Henry James pursued his wonderful and inimitable bent;
and among other names that occur to me, like a mixed handful of jewels
drawn from a bag, are George Street, Morley Roberts, George Gissing, Ella
d'Arcy, Murray Gilchrist, E. Nesbit, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, Edwin
Pugh, Jerome K. Jerome, Kenneth Graham, Arthur Morrison, Marriott Watson,