...giments of volunteers, he fell in one of the earliest skirmishes of the Civil War. His short stories ? and have undoubted power, but they are not to be compared with the best work of Hawthorne and Poe . What O'Brien might have done had he lived into the next period of the short story it is idle to conjecture. As it is, he must be regarded only as an episode, a passing sensation, and he might be ...