a story of an American boy's adventures off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, is not only one of the foremost of boy stories, but is most gripping in interest to adults with any of boyish spirit left in their souls. To Kipling, also, there is nothing more full of romance than a railway engine or a steamship. Of Conrad's novels, Lord Jim, if not the best, is at least the most popular. To those who so curiously think of romanticism as a revival of medieval things and interests and atmosphere, and that alone, Kipling and Conrad would say, " Come, see the romance in this thing right here, this interest of yours, this atmosphere of just now."

Among the romanticists who still strive to restore the atmosphere of a by-gone time, there is Maurice Hewlett, with his extremely fascinating Forest Lovers. But H. G. Wells in modern politics find as much of passion and glamour as in politics of far-gone days; and in the strange wonders of modern science, he finds still more of glamour and romance. May Sinclair, W. J. Locke, and William De Morgan are other writers who appear to be writing the best books among the romantic fiction of our own time. De Morgan's last novel, When Ghost Meets Ghost, with its 862 pages, seems by its popularity to deny flatly the common cry that we can endure nothing now in literature unless it be short.

Contemporary American novelists. Of American novelists it is especially difficult to speak with discrimination. There have been and are no such successes as Cooper and Hawthorne to attract our attention, but Frank Norris, George Washington Cable, James Lane Allen, Thomas Nelson Page, Margaret Deland, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Robert Herrick, Winston Churchill, Owen Wister, Edith Wharton, William Allen White, and, a little earlier, F. Marion Crawford, have won and held a large and enthusiastic audience of thoughtful readers. Had

Frank Norris lived beyond his thirty-seven years, and had he continued in his development of grasp upon the breadth of American life as a whole, there might have come from his pen "the representative American novel." There are a few novelists whose books have sold more widely than those of any of the writers here named, but most of them so greatly lack universality and fineness of artistic portrayal in their work that within a few years their books are certain to be pushed off the shelves by other writers of equal temporary popularity.

II. THE SHORT-STORY

Its function. There is no doubt that the best workmanship in literature to-day is being done upon the short-story. The popularity of the short-story is boundless. This is not due alone, or chiefly, to the brevity of the form, but to a widespread, if not fully conscious, awakened interest in artistic work that is fine and high. Here, in the short-story, is an inexpensive, ready-to-hand, quickly assimilated mode of gratifying this interest; and the short-story writers of note are doing their best to meet this newly awakened demand. A bookman in a city of over half a million people remarked recently that not over six thousand people in that city read anything but the newspaper. Perhaps that was an exaggeration; but it is the shortstory that, more than any other form of literature, is leading the "tired business man" and the "domesticity-wearied woman" and the rest of them out of the daily newspaper into the fore-court, at least, of the sanctuary of literature. It is doing so by making of itself a kind of glorified journalism. In fact the majority of short-stories find their first publication in the daily or weekly or monthly "journals," the best of them, as a rule, in the monthly magazines.

Rudyard Kipling. - Kipling, doubtless, stands at the head of present-day short-story writers. Not that he has a larger group of readers, but among all short-story writers of the present time his imaginative insight and reach of perception place him before all in probability of permanent place in literature. His best work is more or less psychological. The Jungle-Book stories reveal his thought upon the organic relationship of man with nature as a whole; and his Brushwood Boy, They, and The Bridge-Builders, all psychological stories, though less wide in their appeal than the stories in Plain Tales from the Hills and in Soldiers Three, are, along with Without Benefit of Clergy, his strongest claims to permanency in literature.

Three others. Tales of Unrest, by Joseph Conrad, and Little Novels of Italy, by Maurice Hewlett, and Tales of Mean Streets, by Arthur Morrison, come only second to the stories written by Kipling in truth to the life of the human soul and in fineness of artistry in the handling of that truth.

In the colonies. South Africa has furnished at least one superior personage in the field of brief fiction, Mrs. Olive Schreiner, whose little allegorical volume of Dreams is one of the choicest things in modern story-telling. Canada, also, has not been barren. Sir Gilbert Parker's novels and short-stories have their advocates for first place in interest. And the satirical stories by Stephen Leacock, who, strange as it may seem, is professor of political economy in a great university, have led to their author being called "The Mark Twain of Canada." One of Leacock's latest volumes, Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich, is of a more thoughtful character than those which have preceded it, and may have some permanent value.

The contemporary short-story in the United States. Writers of short-stories are legion among the writers living or but recently living in the United States. Some of the best are