General

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PREFATORY NOTE

THE general idea of this series has been so often stated in other volumes, that it will be enough now to say that we have here put together such examples as will show the general character of the short story and also some of the special directions in which it has been developed.

With this view, the particular stories to be chosen were in most cases not only natural, but necessary. With Hawthorne, it was not possible to represent all the different forms in which his genius found expression; with Poe, it seemed just as well not to choose a detective story or a tale of horror. But "The Gold Bug" and "The Fall of the House of Usher" are so familiar that most readers will be glad of a chance to have one of Poe's less known stories.

E. E. H., JR.

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The selections from Nathaniel Hawthorne are used by permission of and special arrangement with Houghton, Mifflin & Co., the authorized publishers of Hawthorne's works.

MY DOUBLE, AND HOW HE UNDID ME, BY EDWARD

EVERETT HALE

199

THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY, BY EDWARD EVER

ETT HALE

229

INTRODUCTION

THERE have been stories, short or long, ever since there have been men, or else the human race would have died of weariness before it had got well started. Men must have always amused themselves by telling stories, and the earliest forms of literature usually are stories of some sort, legends, fables, or myths. But in the literatures that we commonly know they find their earliest form in verse. Verse is almost always earlier in literature than prose. There are various reasons for this which need not be mentioned, but whatever the reason, the fact is that those longer stories that we call novels and the shorter stories that we generally call a "short story,". meaning not merely a story that is short, but rather an especial kind of story,

these are new There is always

in the literature of the world. fiction, and for many centuries there has been prose fiction of a sort, but novels as we understand them to-day began practically in the middle of the eighteenth century, and short stories even later.

It is held by some writers that Irving was one of the first to write short stories. This is hardly