So many stories have taken their inspiration from tonight’s tale as almost to obscure W. W. Jacob’s story, “The Monkey’s Paw.” When even The Simpsons have taken it on, it is time to refresh our acquaintance with the classic original.

“The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in his Child’s Garden of Verses. Stevenson’s versatility and range of imagination can be imagined when we consider the distance between that gentle and ever-charming volume and the thrilling, sometimes macabre stories he wrote for an older audience. Like tonight’s “The Body Snatcher.”

In Frank R. Stockton’s “The Widow’s Cruise,” we meet some veteran tellers of whoppers: four old salts, wholesalers of tall tales. And who tells the topper?

Far from his normal haunts in New York, the city of “The Four Million,” O. Henry spins a tale set in the American Southwest.

Two stories by a writer’s writer, Anton Chekhov.

Tonight, from Canada, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s gently humorous story, “Akin to Love.”

A beautifully observed and crafted early story by Nobel Prize-winning Italian author Grazia Deledda.

If the narrator of tonight’s story were your conversation partner, you might not get in a word edgewise: Ring Lardner’s “Golden Honeymoon.”

Tonight’s high-spirited story features a confrontation between crime fiction’s two most extraordinary minds, Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.

Two wryly observed stories by a master storyteller, who said, “It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living”: Guy de Maupassant.