Heath's Modern Language Series: Spanish Short Stories

EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION, NOTES, AND VOCABULARY
ELIJAH CLARENCE HILLS, Ph.D. Litt.D. Professor of Romance Languages in Colorado College
AND
LOUISE REINHARDT, A.M.
Instructor of Modern Languages in the Colorado Springs High School
D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO

Copyright, 1910, By D. C. Heath & Co.

These Spanish Short Stories are, for the most part, realistic pictures of the manners and customs of modern Spain, written by masters of Spanish prose. All were written in the second half of the nineteenth century or in the first decade of the twentieth,—except the story by Larra, which was written about seventy-five years ago. And all describe recent conditions,—except the tale, partly historical and partly legendary, by Bécquer, which goes back to the invasion of Spain by the French under Napoleon in the early years of the nineteenth century; the story by Larra, which, however, is nearly as true of Castile to-day as it was when written; and Trueba's story, which is partly legendary, partly symbolic, and partly realistic. The stories by Bécquer and Pérez Galdós contain incidents that are supernatural, and those by Fernán Caballero and Alarcón have romantic settings that are highly improbable; but all the stories are, in the main, true to the every-day life of contemporary Spain.
The Spanish stories in this collection have been arranged, so far as possible, in the order of difficulty; but some instructors will doubtless prefer to read them in chronological order, or, better still, in an order determined by the school , or literary affiliations, of each author. This latter arrangement is difficult to make, and it must be, at the best, somewhat arbitrary. But to those who wish to study in these stories the growth of contemporary Spanish fiction, it is suggested that the authors be taken up in the order in which they are given in the Introduction.