This Mark Twain tale recounts an unusual love story: the history of a young couple who meet, fall in love, are engaged, become estranged and then are reunited -- all over the telephone. Alonzo and Rosannah have never been in the same room, but they are determined to spend the rest of their lives together. When a dastardly villain impersonates Alonzo's voice, however, the charming tale is almost upset, leading to a series of hilarious misunderstandings.
The first of P.G. Wodehouse's rollicking tales of Jeeves and Wooster, "Extricating Young Gussie" features the famous butler in a very small role, and doesn't even mention Bertie Wooster's last name. The plot, however, is as thick as ever, as the sour Aunt Agatha persuades Bertie to prevent his cousin Gussie from marrying a chorus girl. The plan begins to backfire when Gussie announces his intention to take up vaudeville himself, and the usual hilarity ensues.
Harriet Bangle visits her cousins in the American frontier in Caroline M.S. Kirkland's knee-slapping short story. When the handsome schoolteacher doesn't respond to her flirtations, she decides to have a little fun, writing him love letters in the name of another girl. The secret correspondence continues, gradually increasing in passion, until the schoolteacher decides to make a move --- and finds that he has gone too far. The girl's father flies into a rage, and the tables are turned in the story's comical conclusion.
In Max Shulman's tale of wit and surprises, the narrator, a young man attending college, swaps his raccoon-skin coat for his roommate's girlfriend, Polly. She ends up being a girl of much physical charm but few brains, and the new boyfriend proceeds to give her a series of lectures in the rudiments of logic. But just as Polly seems to be grasping the flaws in such argumentative strategies as hasty generalization and poisoning the well, a startling reversal occurs . . . .