In a literary career that lasted seventy-one years (1888--1959), Eden Phillpotts, author of more than 250 works, produced twenty-three volumes of realistic short stories. Besides these he published eleven volumes of fairy stories and nine volumes of mystery stories. Well known as the author of The Farmer's Wife (1916), which ran for more than a thousand performances in London's West End, and as a catalyst in launching the career of Agatha Christie, Phillpotts is best remembered for his eighteen Dartmoor novels, published between 1898 and 1923. His realistic short stories are best seen in relation to these novels. Indeed, when Macmillan brought out the Widecombe Edition of the Dartmoor novels in twenty volumes in 1927--1928, the final two volumes, The Fun of the Fair and Brother Man, were selections of Dartmoor stories that had begun with Down Dartmoor Way (1896). The first Dartmoor novel, Children of the Mist (1898), has the same title as...