Excerpt: "Now it has been my pleasant task during the recent months to read or to reread scores upon scores of short stories that have been published in the Atlantic Monthly. My object has been to select from the Atlantic files some of the best and most representative of these narratives for publication in book form, and thus make these significant stories more readily available for the college, school, and the reading public. Out of this study, as it has combined and recombined with all my impressions of past readings, have come certain convictions that have grown more persistent as the reading and the selecting have progressed."