former are reprinted by the country papers and in the Sunday editions of city papers as rapidly and as regularly as they are produced at home.”  Now, the answer to this is simply that these English Novels and English stories are reprinted widely in the United States, not because the American people prefer them to anything else, but because, owing to the absence of international copyright, they cost nothing.  That the American people prefer to read American stories when they can get them is shown by the enormous circulation of the periodicals which make a specialty of American fiction.

I find I have left myself little space to speak of the Short-story as it exists in other literatures than those of Great Britain and the United States, The conditions which have killed the Short-story in England do not obtain elsewhere; and elsewhere there are not a few good writers of Short-stories.  Tourgeneff, Bjoernsen, Sacher-Masoch, Freytag, Lindau, are the names which one recalls at once and without effort as masters in the art and mystery of the Short-story.  Tourgeneff’s Short-stories, in particular, it would be difficult to commend too warmly.  But it is in France that the Short-story flourishes most abundantly.  In France the conditions are not unlike those in the United States; and, although there are few French magazines, there are many Parisian newspapers of a wide hospitality to literature.  The demand for the Short-story has called forth an abundant supply.  Among the writers of the last generation who excelled in the conte—­which is almost the exact French equivalent for Short-story, as nouvelle may be taken to indicate the story which is merely short, the episode, the incident, the amplified anecdote—­were Alfred de Musset, Theophile Gautier, and Prosper Merimee.  The best work of Merimee has never been surpassed.  As compression was with him almost a mania, as, indeed, it was with his friend Tourgeneff, he seemed born on purpose to write Short-stories.  Tourgeneff carried his desire for conciseness so far that he seems always to be experimenting to see how much of his story he may leave out.  One of the foremost among the living writers of contes is M. Edmond About, whose exquisite humor is known to all readers of “The Man with the Broken Ear,”—­a Short-story in conception, though unduly extended in execution.  Few of the charming contes of M. Alphonse Daudet, or of the earlier Short-stories of M. Emile Zola, have been translated into English; and the poetic tales of M. Francois Coppee are likewise neglected in this country.  “The Abbe Constantin” of M. Ludovic Halevy has been read by many, but the Gallic satire of his more Parisian Short-stories has been neglected, perhaps wisely, in spite of their broad humor and their sharp wit.  In the contes of M. Guy de Maupassant there is a manly vigor, pushed at times to excess; and in the very singular collection of stories which M. Jean Richepin has called the “Morts