r. Wilbur Daniel Steele for permission to reprint "The
Yellow Cat," first published in _Harper's Magazine_; to Charles
Scribner's Sons and Miss Mary Synon for permission to reprint "The
Bounty Jumper," first published in _Scribner's Magazine_; and to The
Curtis Publishing Company and Miss Fannie Hurst for permission to
reprint "T.B.," first published in _The Saturday Evening Post_.

Acknowledgments are specially due to _The Boston Evening Transcript_
for permission to reprint the large body of material previously
published in the columns of that paper.

I wish to specially express my gratitude to the following who have
materially assisted by their efforts in making this year-book of American
fiction possible and more complete:

Mr. A.A. Boyden, Mr. Bruce Barton, Mr. Henry A. Bellows, Professor
Albert Frederick Wilson, Mr. Barry Benefield, Mr. Douglas Z. Doty,
Mr. Karl Edwin Harriman, Mr. Edward Frank Allen, Mr. Carl Hovey,
Miss Sonya Levien, Mr. William Griffith, Mr. Arthur T. Vance, Mr.
Mitchell Kennerley, Mr. H.M. Greene, Mr. Robert Bridges, Mr. J.B.
Carrington, Mr. Hayden Carruth, Mr. Frederic A. Duneka, Mr. Henry J.
Forman, Mr. Gilman Hall, Mr. Charles Hanson Towne, Miss Margaret
Anderson, Mr. Charles Edison, Mr. Guido Bruno, Mr. William Marion
Reedy, Mr. John T. Frederick, Mr. Burton Kline, Miss Dorothea
Lawrance Mann, Miss Katharine Butler, Mr. Thomas H. Uzzell, Mr.
Virgil Jordan, Mrs. Elsie Singmaster Lewars, Mr. Alfred A. Knopf,
Miss Hilda Baker, Mr. William Stanley Braithwaite, and Mr. Francis
J. Hannigan, in charge of the Periodical Department of the Boston
Public Library. To Mr. Hannigan my special gratitude is due. My
ability to find certain back numbers of periodicals which the
publishers were unable to supply is due to his personal helpfulness
and unsparing pains. In fact, his assistance at certain times almost
amounted to collaboration.

I shall be grateful to my readers for corrections and particularly
for suggestions leading to the wider usefulness of this annual volume.
In particular, I shall welcome the receipt from authors and publishers,
of stories published during 1916 which have qualities of distinction,
and yet are not printed in periodicals falling under my regular notice.
For such assistance I shall make due and grateful acknowledgment in
next year's annual.

If I have been guilty of any