and 9, 1910, Saturday Evening Post), Fundamental Justice (July 25, 1914, Saturday Evening Post), A Scropper Patcher (October, 1916, Everybody's), and Jolly Bachelors (February, 1918, Cosmopolitan). His best collections are: Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford (1908), Young Wallingford (1910), Wallingford in His Prime (1913), and Wallingford and Blackie Daw (1913). It is often difficult to find in his books short stories that one may be looking for, for the reason that the titles of the individual stories have been removed in order to make the books look like novels subdivided into chapters.

Grace MacGowan Cooke (1863- ) is a writer all of whose work has interest and perdurable stuff in it, but few are the authors whose achievements in the American short story stand out as a whole. In A Call (August, 1906, Harper's) she surpasses herself and is not perhaps herself surpassed by any of the humorous short stories that have come to the fore so far in America in the twentieth century. The story is no less delightful in its fidelity to fact and understanding of young human nature than in its relish of humor. Some of her stories deserving of special mention are: The Capture of Andy Proudfoot (June, 1904, Harper's), In the Strength of the Hills (December, 1905, Metropolitan), The Machinations of Ocoee Gallantine (April, 1906, Century), A Call (August, 1906, Harper's), Scott Bohannon's Bond (May 4, 1907, Collier's), and A Clean Shave (November, 1912, Century). Her best short stories do not seem to have been collected in volumes as yet, although she has had several notable long works of fiction published, such as The Power and the Glory (1910), and several good juveniles.

William James Lampton (?-1917), who was known to many of his admirers as Will Lampton or as W.J.L. merely, was one of the most unique and interesting characters of literary and Bohemian New York from about 1895 to his death in 1917. I remember walking up Fifth Avenue with him one Sunday afternoon just after he had shown me a letter from the man who was then Comptroller of the Currency. The letter was signed so illegibly that my companion was in doubts as to the sender, so he suggested that we stop at a well-known hotel at the corner of 59th Street, and ask the manager who the Comptroller of the Currency then was, so that he might know whom the letter was from. He said that the manager of a big hotel like that, where many prominent people stayed, would be sure to know. When this problem had been solved to our satisfaction, John Skelton Williams proving to be the man, Lampton said, "Now you've told me who he is, I'll show you who I am." So he asked for a copy of The American Magazine at a newsstand in the hotel corridor, opened it, and showed the manager a full-page picture of himself clad in a costume suggestive of the time of Christopher Columbus, with high ruffs around his neck, that happened to appear in the magazine the current month. I mention this incident to illustrate the lack of conventionality and whimsical originality of the man, that stood out no less forcibly in his writings than in his daily life. He had little use for "doing the usual thing in the usual sort of way." He first gained prominence by his book of verse, Yawps (1900). His poems were free from convention in technique as well as in spirit, although their chief innovation was simply that as a rule there was no regular number of syllables in a line; he let the lines be any length they wanted to be, to fit the sense or the length of what he had to say. He once said to me that if anything of his was remembered he thought it would be his poem,Lo, the Summer Girl. His muse often took the direction of satire, but it was always good-natured even when it hit the hardest. He had in his makeup much of the detached philosopher, like Cervantes and Mark Twain.

There was something cosmic about his attitude to life, and this showed in much that he did. He was the only American writer of humorous verse of his day whom I always cared to read, or whose lines I could remember more than a few weeks. This was perhaps because his work was never merely humorous, but always had a big sweep of background to it, like the ruggedness of the Kentucky mountains from which he came. It was Colonel George Harvey, then editor of Harper's Weekly, who had started the boom to make Woodrow Wilson President. Wilson afterwards, at least seemingly, repudiated his sponsor, probably because of Harvey's identification with various moneyed interests. Lampton's poem on the subject, with its refrain, "Never again, said Colonel George," I remember as one of the most notable of his poems on current topics. But what always seemed to me the best of his poems dealing with matters of the hour was one that I suggested he write, which dealt with gift-giving to the public, at about the time that Andrew Carnegie was making a big stir with his gifts for libraries, beginning:

  Dunno, perhaps
  One of the yaps
  Like me would make
  A holy break
  Doing his turn
  With money to burn.
    Anyhow, I
    Wouldn't shy
    Making a try!

and containing, among many effective touches, the pathetic lines,

  … I'd help
  The poor who try to help themselves,
  Who have to work so hard for bread
  They can't get very far ahead.

When James Lane Allen's novel, The Reign of Law, came out (1900), a little quatrain by Lampton that appeared in The Bookman (September, 1900) swept like wildfire across the country, and was read by a hundred times as many people as the book itself:

  "The Reign of Law"?
    Well, Allen, you're lucky;
  It's the first time it ever
    Rained law in Kentucky!

The reader need not be reminded that at that period Kentucky family feuds were well to the fore. As Lampton had started as a poet, the editors were bound to keep him pigeon-holed as far as they could, and his ambition to write short stories was not at first much encouraged by them. His predicament was something like that of the chief character of Frank R. Stockton's story, "His Wife's Deceased Sister" (January, 1884, Century), who had written a story so good that whenever he brought the editors another story they invariably answered in substance, "We're afraid it won't do. Can't you give us something like 'His Wife's Deceased Sister'?" This was merely Stockton's turning to account his own somewhat similar experience with the editors after his story, The Lady or the Tiger? (November, 1882, Century) appeared. Likewise the editors didn't want Lampton's short stories for a while because they liked his poems so well.

Do I hear some critics exclaiming that there is nothing remarkable about How the Widow Won the Deacon, the story by Lampton included in this volume? It handles an amusing situation lightly and with grace. It is one of those things that read easily and are often difficult to achieve. Among his best stories are: The People's Number of the Worthyville Watchman (May 12, 1900, Saturday Evening Post), Love's Strange Spell (April 27, 1901, Saturday Evening Post), Abimelech Higgins' Way (August 24, 1001, Saturday Evening Post), A Cup of Tea (March, 1902, Metropolitan), Winning His Spurs (May, 1904, Cosmopolitan), The Perfidy of Major Pulsifer (November, 1909, Cosmopolitan), How the Widow Won the Deacon (April, 1911, Harper's Bazaar), and A Brown Study (December, 1913, Lippincott's). There is no collection as yet of his short stories. Although familiarly known as "Colonel" Lampton,