The short story is especially adapted to supplement our high-
school reading. It is of a piece with our varied, hurried,
efficient American life, wherein figure the business man's lunch,
the dictagraph, the telegraph, the telephone, the automobile, and
the railway "limited." It has achieved high art, yet conforms to
the modern demand that our literature--since it must be read with
despatch, if read at all--be compact and compelling. Moreover, the
short story is with us in almost overwhelming numbers, and is
probably here to stay. Indeed, our boys and girls are somewhat
appalled at the quantity of material from which they must select
their reading, and welcome any instruction that enables them to
know the good from the bad. It is certain, therefore, that,
whatever else they may throw into the educational discard when
they leave the high school, they will keep and use anything they
may have learned about this form of literature which has become so
powerful a factor in our daily life.

This book does not attempt to select the greatest stories of the
time. What tribunal would dare make such a choice? Nor does it
attempt to trace the evolution of the short story or to point out
natural types and differences. These topics are better suited to
college classes. Its object is threefold: to supply interesting
reading belonging to the student's own time, to help him to see
that there is no divorce between classic and modern literature,
and, by offering him material structurally good and typical of the
qualities represented, to assist him in discriminating between the
artistic and the inartistic. The stories have been carefully
selected, because in the period of adolescence "nothing read fails
to leave its mark"; [Footnote: G Stanley Hall, Adolescence, vol.