The Best Short Stories of 1918 Part 73

54. _The Three Zoological Wishes_, by _Booth Tarkington_ (Collier's Weekly). This is the most amusing study of adolescence that Mr.

Tarkington has given us. It has countless subtle touches of observation which quietly build up two remarkably accurate portraits. I regard it as the best of the new series which Mr. Tarkington has been publis.h.i.+ng in Collier's Weekly.

55. _Five Rungs Gone_, by _Albert W. Tolman_ (Youth's Companion). For many years the most interesting weekly feature of the Youth's Companion has been the danger story in which the youthful hero escapes from extraordinary peril by virtue of courage and great intellectual ingenuity. Most of these stories are built on a regular formula and cannot claim much literary value. But now and then a situation is so vividly realized, and the situation so logically deduced, that the story has literary justification. And "Five Rungs Gone" is altogether exceptional in this respect.

56. _At Isham's_, by _Edward C. Venable_ (Scribner's Magazine). The zest of this story consists in the intellectual subtlety of mental conflict.

It contrasts the characters of several _habitues_ of a New York cafe who form a little group each night for endless discussion. The value of the story rests in the manner in which events bring out variations in character, and the solution of the story is as absorbing as a chess problem.

57. _De Vilmarte's Luck_ (Harper's Magazine) and 58. _Huntington's Credit_ (Harper's Magazine), by _Mary Heaton Vorse_. In these two stories there is a marked contrast of subject matter. "De Vilmarte's Luck" is a study of the artistic temperament, with fine ironies keenly portrayed. The war provides the story with a solution which reveals the finer grain. In "Huntington's Credit" we have a study in suppressed desires, very quietly told, with a poignancy softened somehow by the quality of character. In these two stories Mary Heaton Vorse has given us the best work written by her in the last four years.

59. _The White Battalion_, by _Frances Gilchrist Wood_ (The Bookman).

Here is the last of the fine supernatural legends inspired during the past year by the Great War. The White Battalion of the dead which fights on the side of the Allies is comparable to the marching host seen by Harrison Rhodes in "Extra Men," but there is an _elan_ in this story which suggests a deeper spiritual background.

60. _In the House of Morphy_, by _John Seymour Wood_ (Scribner's Magazine). This legend of old New Orleans has the romantic glow of Mr.

Cable's best novels linked to a well-developed plot with a fine quality of logical surprise. It is one of the best stories written by a fastidious artist of the old school who appears seldom in our magazines, and always with the finest substance that he can give.