And the Oh, Thanks for joining us at 1,001 Classic Short Stories and Tales.

Frank Stockton was an American writer who, like Mark Twain, enjoyed telling a good story and often poked fun at the human condition.

He was very popular during the late 1880s and early 1900s when he published a series of children's

fairy tales,

and one of his novels was the third best-selling book in America in 1895.

His father was a Methodist minister in Philadelphia

who discouraged him from making a career as a writer.

So he worked with a wood engraver until his father's death in 1860.

In 1867, Stockton began to write for a newspaper founded by his brother and published his first fairy tale Tingling later that year.

In style, Frank Stockton broke with tradition, writing his stories in a matter-of-fact manner, avoiding the simple moralizing

that characterized most children's stories, fables, and fairy tales of those days.

His most famous story is, is The Lady or the Tiger, a tale that will tell in the weeks to come.

And now our story, The Widows Cruise by Frank Stockton. The widow's cruise

duchen lived in a small village about 10 miles from the New Jersey sea coast.

In this village she was born, she had married and buried her husband and here she expected

somebody to bury her but she was in no hurry for this for she had scarcely reached

middle age she was a tall woman with no apparent fat in her composition and full of

activity both muscular and mental. She rose at six o'clock in the morning, cooked breakfast, set the table, washed the dishes when the meal was over, milked, churned, swept, washed, ironed, worked in her little garden, attended to the flowers in the front yard, and in the afternoon

knitted and quilted and sewed.

And after tea, she either went to see her neighbors or had them come to see her.

When it was really dark, she lighted the lamp in her parlor and read for an hour.

And if it happened to be one of Miss Mary Wilkins books that she read, she expressed doubts as to the realism of the characters therein described.

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