A Chosen Few

A Chosen Few is a book of short stories by Frank R. Stockton. The preface says the stories were chosen, by virtue of a sort of literary civil-service examination, in order that they might be grouped together as a representative class of the author’s best-known work in this line. The preface says “Negative Gravity” was composed in Switzerland when the author was temporarily confined to the house in full view of unreachable Alps.

A speaker in the book says he wrote a careful and complete account of the invention, and, sealing it up, gave it to his lawyers to be handed to his son after his death. The text says a vast amphitheatre, with its encircling galleries, its mysterious vaults and its unseen passages, was an agent of poetic justice, in which crime was punished, or virtue rewarded, by the decrees of an impartial and incorruptible chance. A speaker named Bentley asks what could be so romantic and yet so real, and what could conduce better to the marriage of verse and philosophy.