From the Introduction: "No Twentieth Century collection of Little Masterpieces would be truly representative if it failed to include a group of modern one-act plays. This type of literary composition has developed remarkably since its rise in the 'Nineties, in England, France, Germany and more especially in America. It is noteworthy that American writers who have done so much with and for the short story should also have been attracted by and have shown proficiency in the composition of the one-act play. The two media, obviously, have many characteristics in common. The swiftness of movement and pitiless pruning away of non-essentials that are indispensable to both have evidently attracted a people that have the reputations of being always in a hurry. There have of course been one-act plays of some sort, time out of mind. They were represented in the religious folk-drama of earlier centuries; in the form of farces they have long been in common use as curtain-raisers or after-pieces; and as "playlets" they have been familiar to the vaudeville audiences of the past fifty years. But the one-act plays in this volume, while differing wildly from each other, have little in common with any of the types just mentioned. The modern one-act play at its best is indubitably a work of art, and we have no hesitation in claiming consideration on this ground for the ten plays that are presented here." Contents: A Night at an Inn Lord Dunsany Beauty and the Jacobin Booth Tarkington Fortune and Men's Eyes Josephine Preston Peabody Overtones Alice Gerstenberg ShamFrank G. Tompkins Eugenically Speaking Edward Goodman The Medicine ShowStuart Walker The Little Man John Galsworthy The Judgment of Indra Dhan Gopal Mukerji The Shadowed Star Mary MacMillan

Some readers find the early morning, when they have all the world to themselves, their best time for reading, and, if you are a good sleeper, and do not find early rising more wearying than refreshing, there is certainly no other time of the day when the mind is so eagerly receptive, has so keen an edge of appetite, and absorbs a book in so fine an intoxication. For your true book-lover there is no other exhilaration so exquisite as that with which one reads an inspiring book in the solemn freshness of early morning. One's nerves seem peculiarly strung for exquisite impressions in the first dewy hours of the day, there is a virginal sensitiveness and purity about all our senses, and the mere delight of the eye in the printed page is keener than at any other time.