INTRODUCTION

I. Esther, From the Old Testament

II.  The history of Ali Baba and the forty robbers, From “The
   Arabian Nights”

III.  Rip Van Winkle, By Washington Irving

IV.  The gold-bug, By Edgar Allan Poe

V. A Christmas carol, By Charles Dickens

VI.  The great stone face, By Nathaniel Hawthorne

VII.  Rab and his friends, By Dr. John Brown

VIII.  The outcasts of poker flat, By Bret Harte

IX.  Markheim, By Robert Louis Stevenson

X. The necklace, By Guy de Maupassant

XI.  The man who would be king, By Rudyard Kipling

XII.  The gift of the magi, By O. Henry

SHORT STORIES

I. ESTHER[*]

[* From the Old Testament, Authorized Version.]

AUTHOR UNKNOWN

[Setting.  The events take place in Susa, the capital of Persia, in the reign of Ahasuerus, or Xerxes (485-465 B.C.).  This foreign locale intensifies the splendid Jewish patriotism that breathes through the story from beginning to end.  If the setting had been in Jerusalem, Esther could not have preached the noble doctrine, “When in Rome, don’t do as Rome does, but be true to the old ideals of home and race.”

Plot.  “Esther” seems to me the best-told story in the Bible.  Observe how the note of empty Persian bigness versus simple Jewish faith is struck at the very beginning and is echoed to the end.  Thus, Ahasuerus ruled over one hundred and twenty-seven provinces, the opening banquet lasted one hundred and eighty-seven days, the king’s bulletins were as unalterable as the tides, the gallows erected was eighty-three feet high, the beds were of gold and silver upon a pavement of red and blue and white and black marble, the money wrested from the Jews was to be eighteen million dollars, etc.  The word “banquet” occurs twenty times in this short story and only twenty times in all the remaining thirty-eight books of the Old Testament.  In other words, Ahasuerus and his trencher-mates ate and drank as much in five days as had been eaten and drunk by all the other Old Testament characters from “Genesis” to “Malachi.”

Note also the contrast between the two queens, the two prime ministers, the two edicts, and the two later banquets.  The most masterly part of the plot is the handling of events between these banquets.  Read again from chapter v, beginning at verse 9, through chapter vi, and note how skillfully the pen is held.  In motivation as well as in symmetry and naturalness the story is without a peer.  There is humor, too, in the solemn deliberations over Vashti’s “No” (chapter i, verses 12-22) and in the strange procession led by pedestrian Haman (chapter vi, verses 6-11).