asterisk is prefixed, and
this asterisk, I must confess, reveals in some measure a personal
preference, for which, perhaps, I may be indulged. It is from this final
short list that the stories reprinted in this volume have been selected.

It has been a point of honor with me not to republish an English story,
nor a translation from a foreign author. I have also made it a rule not
to include more than one story by an individual author in the volume.
The general and particular results of my study will be found explained
and carefully detailed in the supplementary part of the volume.

As in past years it has been my pleasure and honor to associate this
annual with the names of Benjamin Rosenblatt, Richard Matthews Hallet,
Wilbur Daniel Steele, and Arthur Johnson, so it is my wish to dedicate
this year the best that I have found in the American magazines as the
fruit of my labors to Anzia Yezierska, whose story, "Fat of the Land",
seems to me perhaps the finest imaginative contribution to the short
story made by an American artist this year.

EDWARD J. O'BRIEN.

OXFORD, ENGLAND,
October 29, 1919.

THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1919

NOTE.--The order in which the stories in this volume are printed is not
intended as an indication of their comparative excellence; the
arrangement is alphabetical by authors.

THE KITCHEN GODS[2]

[Note 2: Copyright, 1919, by The Century Company. Copyright, 1920,
by Gulielma Fell Alsop.]

BY GULIELMA FELL ALSOP

From _The Century_

The lilies bloomed that day. Out in the courtyard, in their fantastic
green-dragoned pots, one by one the tiny, ethereal petals opened.
Dong-Yung went rapturously among them, stooping low to inhale their
faint fragrance. The square courtyard, guarded on three sides by the
wings of the house, facing the windowless blank wall on the fourth, was
mottled with sunlight. Just this side of the wall a black shadow, as
straight and opaque as the wall itself, banded the court with darkness;
but on the hither side, where the lilies bloomed and Dong-Yung moved
among them, lay glittering, yellow sunlight. The little box of a house
where the gate-keeper lived made a bulge in the uniform blackness of the
wall and its shadow. The two tall poles, with the upturned baskets, the
devil-catchers, rose like flagstaffs from both sides of the door. A huge
china griffon stood at the right of the gate. From beyond the wall came
the sounds of early morning--the cli