Famous Short Storys.

                       The Poet and the Peasant THE OTHER DAY a poet friend of mine, who has lived in close communication with nature all his life, wrote a poem and took it to an editor. It was a living pastoral, full of the genuine breath of the fields, the song of birds, and the pleasant chatter of trickling streams. When the poet called again, with hopes of a beefsteak dinner in his heart, it was handed back to him with the comment, 'Too artificial.' Several of us met over spaghetti and Dutchess County Chianti and swallowed indignation with slippery forkfuls. And there we dug a pit for the editor. With us was Conant, a well-arrived writer of fiction—a man who had trod on asphalt all his life and who had never looked upon bucolic scenes except with sensations of disgust from the windows of express trains. Conant wrote a poem and called it 'The Doe and the Brook.' It was a fine specimen of the kind of work you would expect f...

                                                            The Last Leaf In a little district west of Washington Square, the streets have gone wild and fractured themselves into narrow strips called 'places.' These 'places' twist at strange angles and curves, with one street crossing itself more than once. An artist once found an intriguing possibility on this street. Imagine a collector, with a bill for paints, paper, and canvas, traversing this route only to meet himself coming back with not a cent paid! So, to the quaint old Greenwich Village, the artists soon came prowling, searching for north-facing windows, eighteenth-century gables, Dutch attics, and affordable rents. They imported pewter mugs and a few chafing dishes from Sixth Avenue and became a 'colony.' At the top of a squatty, three-story brick building, Sue and Johnsy ...

                                  The Furnished Room RESTLESS, SHIFTING, FUGACIOUS, as time itself, is a certain vast bulk of the population of the redbrick district of the lower West Side. Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients forever—transients in abode, transients in heart and mind. They sing 'Home Sweet Home' in ragtime; they carry their lares et penates in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree. Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers, should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but it would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the wake of all these vagrant ghosts. One evening after dark, a young man prowled among these crumbling red mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth, he rested his lean handbag upon the step and...

                        The Lovephiltre of Ikey Schoenstein The Blue Light Drug Store is downtown, nestled between Bowery and First Avenue, where the distance between the two streets is the shortest. The Blue Light does not view pharmacy as a realm of bric-a-brac, scents, and ice-cream soda. If you ask for a painkiller there, it won't hand you a bonbon. The Blue Light scorns the labor-saving arts of modern pharmacy. It macerates its opium and percolates its own laudanum and paregoric. To this day, pills are made behind its tall prescription desk—pills rolled out on its pill-tile, divided with a spatula, shaped with finger and thumb, dusted with calcined magnesia, and delivered in small round, pasteboard pill-boxes. The store sits on a corner where coveys of ragged-plumed, joyous children play, soon to become candidates for the cough drops and soothing syrups that await them inside. I...

                                 Memoirs of a Yellow Dog I don't suppose it will knock any of you off your perch to read a contribution from an animal. Mr. Kipling and a good many others have demonstrated the fact that animals can express themselves in remunerative English, and no magazine goes to press nowadays without an animal story in it, except the old-style monthlies that are still running pictures of Bryan and the Mont Pelée horror. But you needn't look for any stuck-up literature in my piece, such as Bearoo, the bear, Snakoo, the snake, and Tammanoo, the tiger, talk in the jungle books. A yellow dog that's spent most of his life in a cheap New York flat, sleeping in a corner on an old sateen underskirt (the one she spilled port wine on at the Lady Longshoremen's banquet), mustn't be expected to perform any tricks with the ...

                                    The Cop and the Anthem ON HIS BENCH IN MADISON SQUARE, Soapy moved uneasily. When wild geese honked high at night, when women without sealskin coats grew kind to their husbands, and when Soapy shifted uncomfortably on his bench in the park, you could tell that winter was near at hand. A dead leaf fell into Soapy's lap. That was Jack Frost's calling card. Jack was considerate to the regular residents of Madison Square, giving fair warning of his annual visit. At the corners of four streets, he handed his card to the North Wind, the footman of the mansion of All Outdoors, so the inhabitants could prepare. Soapy's mind became aware that it was time for him to become a singular Committee of Ways and Means to prepare for the approaching cold. And so, he shifted uneasily on his bench....

                               The Coming-out of Maggie EVERY SATURDAY NIGHT, the Clover Leaf Social Club held a hop in the hall of the Give and Take Athletic Association on the East Side. To attend one of these dances, you must be a member of the Give and Take, or, if you belong to the division that starts off with the right foot in waltzing, you must work in Rhinegold's paper-box factory. Still, any Clover Leaf was privileged to escort or be escorted by an outsider to a single dance. But mostly, each Give and Take brought the paper-box girl that he affected, and few strangers could boast of having shaken a foot at the regular hops. Maggie Toole, with her dull eyes, broad mouth, and left-handed style of footwork in the two-step, went to the dances with Anna McCarty and her 'fellow.' Anna and Maggie worked side by side in the factory and we...

                                                     A Service of Love WHEN ONE LOVES ONE'S ART, no service seems too hard. That is our premise. This story will draw a conclusion from it and show at the same time that the premise is incorrect. That will be a new thing in logic and a feat in storytelling somewhat older than the Great Wall of China. Joe Larrabee came out of the post-oak flats of the Middle West, pulsing with a genius for pictorial art. At six, he drew a picture of the town pump with a prominent citizen passing it hastily. This effort was framed and hung in the drug store window by the side of the ear of corn with an uneven number of rows. At twenty, he left for New York with a flowing necktie and a capital tied up somewhat closer. Delia Caruthers did things in six octaves so promisingly in a pine-tree village in the South that her re...