THE BEST MAINE STORIES, edited by Sanford Phippen, Charles Waugh and Martin Greenberg, Down East Books, 312 pages, $11.95.

This eponymous anthology of short fiction written by writers long on talent flashes with the prismatic moods of Maine’s people and places. Divided into seasonal categories, it offers a sampling of 17 stories winnowed from the past 106 years and authored by such respected names as Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, Holman Day, Stephen Minot and Carolyn Chute.

One of the longest pieces is Arthur Train’s affable morality tale, “The Viking’s Daughter,” an amusing chronicle of the dilemma of Mr. Dingle, a wealthy New York summer resident on Mount Desert, and how it is resolved by his “shrewd but kindly” lawyer, the resourceful Mr. Tutt who behind his client’s back refers to him as Mr. Dingbat. It is the firm intention of the rich-as-Midas Dingle, Korn Pops czar, to quash the romance between his only son and heir, Robert, and the beauteous Dizzy Zucker, daughter of a poor island lobsterman. Buy her off. Pay her anything she asks. “Buy the whole island,” raged Mr. Dingba — er, Dingle. So Mr. Tutt threw himself into the fray and emerged with a solution that surprised everyone concerned.

In sharp and chilling contrast, Lawrence Sargent Hall (1875-1945) weaves a web of terror with such relentless plausibility it finally entraps even the reader. “The Ledge” begins innocently enough in the predawn of a Christmas morning as a rough-and-ready fisherman and his teen-age son and nephew set out in his boat on a duck hunt. After a two-hour run through the choppy sea they arrive at the foam-spewed ledges on Brown Cow Island to await the flocks of ducks. There, something happens; something so horrifying the mind recoils from its reality. This gripping tale won Hall (an English professor who retired from Bowdoin in 1986) the O. Henry Memorial Award.

“Capturing the essence of Maine on paper … is as elusive a task as there is for language,” writes Sanford Phippen, one of the trio of editors, in the book’s afterword. He also dispels the notion of its cultural ethnicity. “We are not all WASPS,” since Willis Johnson’s “Prayer for the Dying,” is set among the Russians in Richmond and Rebecca Cummings’ “Berrying” features Finnish people near South Paris. Phippen, a Maine author and columnist who works and lives in Hancock and Orono, postulates that an important element of the verism that marks the works of most of the Maine writers of his generation — “people in their late thirties and early forties (such as) Stephen King, Margaret Dickson and others –” is the poverty they have known firsthand and put to print so convincingly. In his own anthology entry, “Step-Over Toe-Hold,” a gritty tale of the unsuccessful struggle of a sensitive young boy to establish some sort of rapprochement with his blue-collar truck-driver father, one hears the echo of Phippen’s own admission, “My case is no doubt typical. My family was poor.”

Lust in a lighthouse (“Maine” by Margaret Osborn); Henry James’ lighthearted epistolary “A Bundle of Letters” in which Miss Miranda Hope of Bangor, Maine, writes home to her mother from Paris, “The price of board struck me as rather high”; the lark that winds up in a sweat of fear when two teen-agers, arriving early at their parents’ summer camp in Maine, decide to poach lobsters (“The Lesson” by Sam Brown Jr); and Carolyn Chute’s bleak “Ollie, Oh” further illuminate Maine’s rugged, enduring ethos.

Of all the stories in this collection, however, none is dearer or more moving than Virginia Chase’s “The Search” which first appeared in Puckerbrush Review in 1983. Born and reared in Blue Hill, Chase (1902-1987) was one of eight children. A magna cum laude graduate of the University of Minnesota, she also earned her M.A. at Wayne University, and was awarded the Avery Hopwood Award for Fiction. In her pearl of a short story, “The Search,” a young boy decides never to give up his search for a lost object he is convinced is priceless to the happiness and well-being of its owner. As haunting as a fleeting fragrance, as charming as the shy sun slipping below the line of the horizon, “The Search” is a metaphor for that preciousness which puts a lump in the throat or a tear in the eye.

Welcome “The Best Maine Stories” into your library. It opens up vistas as myriad as Maine’s scenic views.

Bea Goodrich’s reviews are a monthly feature in the Books & Music section.