Stockton.
_His Wife's Deceased Sister_, Frank R. Stockton.
_Legend of Sleepy Hollow_, Washington Irving.
_Monsieur du Miroir_, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
_At the End of the Passage_, Rudyard Kipling.
_The Vacant Lot_, Mary Wilkins Freeman.
_The Princess Pourquoi_, Margaret Sherwood.
_What Was It? A Mystery_, Fitz-James O'Brien.
_Wandering Willie's Tale_, Walter Scott.
THE PIECE OF STRING[1]
_By Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)_
On all the roads about Goderville the peasants and their wives were
coming toward the town, for it was market day. The men walked at an
easy gait, the whole body thrown forward with every movement of their
long, crooked legs, misshapen by hard work, by the bearing down on the
plough which at the same time causes the left shoulder to rise and the
figure to slant; by the mowing of the grain, which makes one hold his
knees apart in order to obtain a firm footing; by all the slow and
laborious tasks of the fields. Their starched blue blouses, glossy as
if varnished, adorned at the neck and wrists with a bit of white
stitchwork, puffed out about their bony chests like balloons on the
point of taking flight, from which protrude a head, two arms, and two
feet.
Some of them led a cow or a calf at the end of a rope. And their
wives, walking behind the beast, lashed it with a branch still covered
with leaves, to hasten its pace.
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