Excerpt from introduction: "Among these ten there are tales of all sorts, from the tragic adventure of "An Accident" to the pendent portraits of the "Two Clowns, " cutting in its sarcasm, but not bitter-from "The Captain’s Vices, " which suggests at once George Eliot’s Silas Marner and Mr. Austin Dobson’s Tale of Polypheme, to the sombre revery of the poet "At Table, " a sudden and searching light cast on the labor and misery which underlies the luxury of our complex modern existence. Like "At Table, " "A Dramatic Funeral" is a picture more than it is a story; it is a marvellous reproduction of the factitious emotion of the good-natured stage folk, who are prone to overact even their own griefs and joys. "A Dramatic Funeral" seems to me always as though it might be a painting of M. Jean Beraud, that most Parisian of artists, just as certain stories of M. Guy de Maupassant inevitably suggest the bold freedom of M. Forain’s sketches in black-and-white."