l Thing."

Rudyard Kipling: "The Day's Work;" "In Black and White;" "Indian
Tales;" "The Jungle Book;" "Life's Handicap;" "Many Inventions;"
"The Phantom 'Rickshaw;" "Plain Tales from the Hills;" "The
Second Jungle Book;" "Soldiers Three and Military Tales;"
"Soldier Stories;" "Under the Deodars."

Brander Matthews: "Outlines in Local Color;" "Tales of Fantasy
and Fact;" "Vignettes of Manhattan."

Guy de Maupassant: "The Odd Number."

Thomas Nelson Page: "The Burial of the Guns;" "In Ole Virginia."

Scribner's series: "Short Stories by American Authors."

Robert Louis Stevenson: "The Island Nights' Entertainments;"
"The Merry Men;" "New Arabian Nights."

Frank R. Stockton: "Amos Kilbright;" "The Lady, or the Tiger?"
"Rudder Grange;" "A Story Teller's Pack."

John Watson (Ian Maclaren): "Auld Lang Syne;" "Beside the Bonnie
Brier Bush."

Mary E. Wilkins: "A Humble Romance;" "The Love of Parson Lord;"
"A New England Nun;" "The Pot of Gold;" "Silence;" "Young
Lucretia."

III

THE PLOT

The plot is the nucleus of the story, the bare thought or incident
upon which the narrative is to be builded. When a child says,
"Grandma, tell me the story of how the whale swallowed Jonah," he
gives the plot of the story that he desires; and the grandmother
proceeds to elaborate that primal idea to suit the taste of her
auditor. In like manner, before you put pen to paper, you must have
in mind some interesting idea which you wish to express in narrative
form; the absence of such an idea means that you have no plot, no
story to tell, and therefore have no business to be writing. If you
undertake to tell a short story, go about it in a workmanlike manner:
don't begin scribbling pretty phrases, and trust to Providence to
introduce the proper story, but yourself provide the basic facts. If
you do not begin correctly, it is useless for you to begin at all.

A plot implies action--that is, something must happen; at the
conclusion of the story the characters must be differently situated, and
usually differently related one to another, from what they were at the
beginning. The event need not be tragic, or even serious; but it must be
of sufficient importance, novelty and interest to justify its relation
in narrative form. In general the plot of a short story involves an
incident or a minor crisis in a human life, rather than the supreme
crisis whi