"A short story should be something between a poem and a reflection, a novel and an anecdote. The very best stories have a little of the character of all four." Having made this claim in the introduction to this engaging collection of stories, J.M. Reid goes on to state that, if not universally true, this description certainly does apply to the twenty-two Scottish stories included in the volume. Covering the last century and a half, these stories present the Scots as a historically minded people with a strong sense of the changing flow of time and deep feeling for the eerie and supernatural. The volume includes stories by Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Gillespie, George MacDonald, Robert Louis Stevenson, R.B. Cunninghame Graham, Samuel Rutherford Crockett, Sir James Barrie, Neil Munro, Neil M. Gunn, John MacNair Reid, Naomi Mitchison, Eric Linklater, Ian Macpherson, Fred Urquhart, Morley Jamieson, Dorothy K. Haynes, and Ian Hamilton Finlay. It also contains a glossary of unfamiliar words and phrases in Scots and Gaelic.