Short stories from 100 Selected Stories, by O Henry

 The Gift of the Magi

 A Cosmopolite in a Café
 Between Rounds  The Skylight Room
 A Service of Love
 The Coming-Out of Maggie
 The Cop and the Anthem
 Memoirs of a Yellow Dog
 The Love-philtre of Ikey Shoenstein
 The Furnished Room
 The Last Leaf
 The Poet and the Peasant
 A Ramble in Aphasia
 A Municipal Report
 Proof of the Pudding
 I

The Gift of the Magi

ONE DOLLAR AND EIGHTY-SEVEN CENTS. That was all. And

sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time
by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until
one's cheek burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such
close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and
eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.
There was clearly nothing left to do but flop down on the shabby
little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral
reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with
sniffles predominating.
While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first
stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per
week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that
word on the look-out for the mendicancy squad.
In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would
go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a
ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name 'Mr.
James Dillingham Young.'
The 'Dillingham' had been flung to the breeze during a former
period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week.
Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, the letters of 'Dillingham'
looked blurred, as though they were thinking seriously of contracting
to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham
Young came home and reached his flat above he was called 'Jim' and
greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced
to you as Della. Which is all very good.
Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder
rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a grey cat
walking a grey fence in a grey backyard. To-morrow would be
Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a
present. She had been saving every penny she could for
2 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES
months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far.
Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are.
Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she
had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and
rare and sterling - something just a little bit near to being worthy of
the honour of being owned by Jim.
There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps
you have seen a pier-glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile
person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of
longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks.
Della, being slender, had mastered the art.
Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass.
Her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its colour
within twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall
to its full length.
Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs
in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim's gold watch that
had been his father's and his grandfather's. The other was Della's hair.
Had the Queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della
would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to
depreciate Her Majesty's jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the
janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have
pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his
beard from envy.
So now Della's beautiful hair fell about her, rippling and shining
like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made
itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously
and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear
or two splashed on the worn red carpet.
On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a
whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she
fluttered out of the door and down the stairs to the street.
Where she stopped the sign read: 'Mme. Sofronie. Hair Goods of
All Kinds.' One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting.
Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the 'Sofronie.'
'Will you buy my hair?' asked Della.
'I buy hair,' said Madame. 'Take yer hat off and let's have a sight at
the looks of it.'
Down rippled the brown cascade.
'Twenty dollars,' said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised
hand.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 3
'Give it to me quick,' said Della.
Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the
hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim's present.
She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one
else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned
all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in
design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by
meretricious ornamentation - as all good things should do. It was even
worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be
Jim's. It was like him. Quietness and value - the description applied to
both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried
home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be
properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch
was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather
strap that he used in place of a chain.
When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to
prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas
and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to
love. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends - a mammoth
task.
Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, closelying
curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She
looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.
'If Jim doesn't kill me,' she said to herself, 'before he takes a second
look at me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what
could I do - oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty-seven cents?'
At seven o'clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the
back of the stove, hot and ready to cook the chops.
Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat
on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then
she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she
turned white for just a moment. She had a habit of saying little silent
prayers about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered:
'Please God, make him think I am still pretty.'
The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin
and very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two - and to be
burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was
without gloves.
4 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES
Jim stepped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of
quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in
them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor
surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that
she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that
peculiar expression on his face.
Della wriggled off the table and went for him.
'Jim, darling,' she cried, 'don't look at me that way. I had my hair
cut off and sold it because I couldn't have lived through Christmas
without giving you a present. It'll grow out again - you won't mind,
will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say "Merry
Christmas!" Jim, and let's be happy. You don't know what a nice -
what a beautiful, nice gift I've got for you.'
'You've cut off your hair?' asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not
arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labour.
'Cut it off and sold it,' said Della. 'Don't you like me just as well,
anyhow? I'm me without my hair, ain't I?'
Jim looked about the room curiously.
'You say your hair is gone?' he said with an air almost of idiocy.
'You needn't look for it,' said Della. 'It's sold, I tell you - sold and
gone, too. It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you.
Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered,' she went on with a
sudden serious sweetness, 'but nobody could ever count my love for
you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?'
Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his
Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some
inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a
million a year - what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit
would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts,
but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated
later on.
Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the
table.
'Don't make any mistake, Dell,' he said, 'about me. I don't think
there's anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that
could make me like my girl any less. But if you'll unwrap that package
you may see why you had me going awhile at first.'
White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an
ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to
hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of
all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 5
For there lay The Combs - the set of combs, side and back, that
Della had worshipped for long in a Broadway window. Beautiful
combs, pure tortoiseshell, with jewelled rims - just the shade to wear
in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew,
and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the
least hope of possession. And now they were hers, but the tresses that
should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.
But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to
look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: 'My hair grows so fast,
Jim!'
And then Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, 'Oh, oh!'
Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him
eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash
with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.
'Isn't it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You'll have
to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I
want to see how it looks on it.'
Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his
hands under the back of his head and smiled.
'Dell,' said he, 'let's put our Christmas presents away and keep 'em
awhile. They're too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get
the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops
on.'
The magi, as you know, were wise men - wonderfully wise men -
who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of
giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise
ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of
duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful
chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely
sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a
last word to the wise of these days, let it be said that of all who give
gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such
as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
6 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

II

A Cosmopolite in a Café

AT MIDNIGHT THE CAFÉ was crowded. By some chance the little

table at which I sat had escaped the eye of incomers, and two vacant
chairs at it extended their arms with venal hospitality to the influx of
patrons.
And then a cosmopolite sat in one of them, and I was glad, for I
held a theory that since Adam no true citizen of the world has existed.
We hear of them, and we see foreign labels on much luggage, but we
find travellers instead of cosmopolites.
I invoke your consideration of the scene - the marble-topped tables,
the range of leather-upholstered wall seats, the gay company, the
ladies dressed in demi-state toilets, speaking in an exquisite visible
chorus of taste, economy, opulence or art, the sedulous and largess-
loving garçons, the music wisely catering to all with its raids upon the
composers; the mélange of talk and laughter - and, if you will, the
Würzburger in the tall glass cones that bend to your lips as a ripe
cherry sways on its branch to the beak of a robber jay. I was told by a
sculptor from Mauch Chunk that the scene was truly Parisian.
My cosmopolite was named E. Rushmore Coglan, and he will be
heard from next summer at Coney Island. He is to establish a new
'attraction' there, he informed me, offering kingly diversion. And then
his conversation rang along parallels of latitude and longitude. He
took the great, round world in his hand, so to speak, familiarly,
contemptuously, and it seemed no larger than the seed of a
Maraschino cherry in a table-d'hôte grape fruit. He spoke
disrespectfully of the equator, he skipped from continent to continent,
he derided the zones, he mopped up the high seas with his napkin.
With a wave of his hand he would speak of a certain bazaar in
Hyderabad. Whiff! He would have you on skis in Lapland. Zip! Now
you rode the breakers with the Kanakas at Kealaikahiki. Presto! He
dragged you through an Arkansas postoak swamp, let you dry for a
moment on the alkali plains of his Idaho ranch, then whirled you into
the society of Viennese archdukes. Anon he would be telling you of a
cold he acquired in a Chicago lake breeze and how old Escamila cured
it in Buenos Ayres with a hot infusion of the chuchula weed. You
would have
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 7

addressed the letter to 'E. Rushmore Coglan, Esq., the Earth, Solar
System, the Universe,' and have mailed it, feeling confident that it
would be delivered to him.
I was sure that I had at last found the one true cosmopolite since
Adam, and I listened to his world-wide discourse fearful lest I should
discover in it the local note of the mere globe-trotter. But his opinions
never fluttered or drooped; he was as impartial to cities, countries and
continents as the winds or gravitation.
And as E. Rushmore Coglan prattled of this little planet I thought
with glee of a great almost-cosmopolite who wrote for the whole
world and dedicated himself to Bombay. In a poem he has to say that
there is pride and rivalry between the cities of the earth, and that 'the
men that breed from them, they traffic up and down, but cling to their
cities' hem as a child to the mother's gown.' And whenever they walk
'by roaring streets unknown' they remember their native city 'most
faithful, foolish, fond; making her mere-breathed name their bond
upon their bond.' And my glee was roused because I had caught Mr.
Kipling napping. Here I had found a man not made from dust; one
who had no narrow boasts of birthplace or country, one who, if he
bragged at all, would brag of his whole round globe against the
Martians and the inhabitants of the Moon.
Expression on these subjects was precipitated from E. Rushmore
Coglan by the third corner to our table. While Coglan was describing
to me the topography along the Siberian Railway the orchestra glided
into a medley. The concluding air was 'Dixie,' and as the exhilarating
notes tumbled forth they were almost overpowered by a great clapping
of hands from almost every table.
It is worth a paragraph to say that this remarkable scene can be
witnessed every evening in numerous cafés in the City of New York.
Tons of brew have been consumed over theories to account for it.
Some have conjectured hastily that all Southerners in town hie
themselves to cafés at nightfall. This applause of the 'rebel' air in a
Northern city does puzzle a little; but it is not insolvable. The war with
Spain, many years' generous mint and water-melon crops, a few long-
shot winners at the New Orleans race-track, and the brilliant banquets
given by the Indiana and Kansas citizens who compose the North
Carolina Society, have made the South rather a 'fad' in Manhattan.
Your manicure will lisp softly that your left forefinger reminds her so
much of a gentleman's in Richmond, Va. Oh, certainly; but many a
lady has to work now - the war, you know.
8 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES
When 'Dixie' was being played a dark-haired young man sprang up
from somewhere with a Mosby guerrilla yell and waved frantically his
soft-brimmed hat. Then he strayed through the smoke, dropped into
the vacant chair at our table and pulled out cigarettes.
The evening was at the period when reserve is thawed. One of us
mentioned three Würzburgers to the waiter; the dark-haired young
man acknowledged his inclusion in the order by a smile and a nod. I
hastened to ask him a question because I wanted to try out a theory I
had.
'Would you mind telling me,' I began, 'whether you are from - '
The fist of E. Rushmore Coglan banged the table and I was jarred
into silence.
'Excuse me,' said he, 'but that's a question I never like to hear asked.
What does it matter where a man is from? Is it fair to judge a man by
his post-office address? Why, I've seen Kentuckians who hated
whisky, Virginians who weren't descended from Pocahontas,
Indianians who hadn't written a novel, Mexicans who didn't wear
velvet trousers with silver dollars sewed along the seams, funny
Englishmen, spendthrift Yankees, cold-blooded Southerners, narrow-
minded Westerners, and New Yorkers who were too busy to stop for
an hour on the street to watch a one-armed grocer's clerk do up
cranberries in paper bags. Let a man be a man and don't handicap him
with the label of any section.'
'Pardon me,' I said, 'but my curiosity was not altogether an idle one.
I know the South, and when the band plays "Dixie" I like to observe. I
have formed the belief that the man who applauds that air with special
violence and ostensible sectional loyalty is invariably a native of
either Secaucus, N.J., or the district between Murray Hill Lyceum and
the Harlem River, this city. I was about to put my opinion to the test
by inquiring of this gentleman when you interrupted with your own -
larger theory, I must confess.'
And now the dark-haired young man spoke to me, and it became
evident that his mind also moved along its own set of grooves.
'I should like to be a periwinkle,' said he, mysteriously, 'on the top
of a valley, and sing too-ralloo-ralloo.'
This was clearly too obscure, so I turned again to Coglan.
'I've been around the world twelve times,' said he. 'I know an
Esquimau in Upernavik who sends to Cincinnati for his neckties, and I
saw a goat-herder in Uruguay who won a prize in a Battle Creek
breakfast-food puzzle competition. I pay rent on a room in
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 9

Cairo, Egypt, and another in Yokohama all the year round. I've got
slippers waiting for me in a tea-house in Shanghai, and I don't have to
tell 'em how to cook my eggs in Rio de Janeiro or Seattle. It's a mighty
little old world. What's the use of bragging about being from the
North, or the South, or the old manor-house in the dale, or Euclid
Avenue, Cleveland, or Pike's Peak, or Fairfax County, Va., or
Hooligan's Flats or any place? It'll be a better world when we quit
being fools about some mildewed town or ten acres of swampland just
because we happened to be born there.'
'You seem to be a genuine cosmopolite,' I said admiringly. 'But it
also seems that you would decry patriotism.'
'A relic of the stone age,' declared Coglan warmly. 'We are all
brothers - Chinamen, Englishmen, Zulus, Patagonians, and the people
in the bend of the Kaw River. Some day all this petty pride in one's
city or state or section or country will be wiped out, and we'll all be
citizens of the world, as we ought to be.'
'But while you are wandering in foreign lands,' I persisted, 'do not
your thoughts revert to some spot - some dear and - '
'Nary a spot,' interrupted E. R. Coglan flippantly. 'The terrestrial,
globular, planetary hunk of matter, slightly flattened at the poles, and
known as the Earth, is my abode. I've met a good many object-bound
citizens of this country abroad. I've seen men from Chicago sit in a
gondola in Venice on a moonlight night and brag about their drainage
canal. I've seen a Southerner on being introduced to the King of
England hand that monarch, without batting his eyes, the information
that his grandaunt on his mother's side was related by marriage to the
Perkinses, of Charleston. I knew a New Yorker who was kidnapped
for ransom by some Afghanistan bandits. His people sent over the
money and he came back to Kabul with the agent. "Afghanistan?" the
natives said to him through an interpreter. "Well, not so slow, do you
think?" "Oh, I don't know," says he, and he begins to tell them about a
cab-driver at Sixth Avenue and Broadway. Those ideas don't suit me.
I'm not tied down to anything that isn't 8,000 miles in diameter. Just
put me down as E. Rushmore Coglan, citizen of the terrestrial sphere.'
My cosmopolite made a large adieu and left me, for he thought that
he saw someone through the chatter and smoke whom he knew. So I
was left with the would-be periwinkle, who was reduced to
Würzburger without further ability to voice his aspirations to perch,
melodious, upon the summit of a valley.
I sat reflecting upon my evident cosmopolite and wondering how
the poet had managed to miss him. He was my discovery and
10 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

I believed in him. How was it? 'The men that breed from them they
traffic up and down, but cling to their cities' hem as a child to the
mother's gown.'
Not so E. Rushmore Coglan. With the whole world for his –
My meditations were interrupted by a tremendous noise and
conflict in another part of the café. I saw above the heads of the seated
patrons E. Rushmore Coglan and a stranger to me engaged in terrific
battle. They fought between the tables like Titans, and glasses
crashed, and men caught their hats up and were knocked down, and a
brunette screamed, and a blonde began to sing 'Teasing.'
My cosmopolite was sustaining the pride and reputation of the
Earth when the waiters closed in on both combatants with their
famous flying wedge formation and bore them outside, still resisting.
I called McCarthy, one of the French garçons, and asked him the
cause of the conflict.
'The man with the red tie' (that was my cosmopolite), said he, 'got
hot on account of things said about the bum sidewalks and water
supply of the place he come from by the other guy.'
'Why,' said I, bewildered, 'that man is a citizen of the world - a
cosmopolite. He - '
'Originally from Mattawamkeag, Maine, he said,' continued
McCarthy, 'and he wouldn't stand for no knockin' the place.'

III

Between Rounds

THE MAY MOON SHONE BRIGHT upon the private boarding-

house of Mrs. Murphy. By reference to the almanac a large amount of
territory will be discovered upon which its rays also fell. Spring was
in its heyday, with hay fever soon to follow. The parks were green
with new leaves and buyers for the Western and Southern trade.
Flowers and summer-resort agents were blowing; the air and answers
to Lawson were growing milder; hand-organs, fountains and pinochle
were playing everywhere.
The windows of Mrs. Murphy's boarding-house were open. A group
of boarders were seated on the high stoop upon round, flat mats like
German pancakes.
In one of the second-floor front windows Mrs. McCaskey
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 11

awaited her husband. Supper was cooling on the table. Its heat went
into Mrs. McCaskey.
At nine Mr. McCaskey came. He carried his coat on his arm and his
pipe in his teeth; and he apologized for disturbing the boarders on the
steps as he selected spots of stone between them on which to set his
size 9, width Ds.
As he opened the door of his room he received a surprise. Instead of
the usual stove-lid or potato-masher for him to dodge, came only
words.
Mr. McCaskey reckoned that the benign May moon had softened
the breast of his spouse.
'I heard ye,' came the oral substitutes for kitchenware. 'Ye can
apollygize to riff-raff of the streets for settin' yer unhandy feet on the
tails of their frocks, but ye'd walk on the neck of yer wife the length of
a clothes-line without so much as a "Kiss me fut," and I'm sure, it's
that long from rubberin' out the windy for ye and the victuals cold
such as there's money to buy after drinkin' up yer wages at Gallegher's
every Saturday evenin', and the gas man here twice to-day for his.'
'Woman!' said Mr. McCaskey, dashing his coat and hat upon a
chair, 'the noise of ye is an insult to me appetite. When ye run down
politeness ye take the mortar from between the bricks of the
foundations of society. 'Tis no more than exercisin' the acrimony of a
gentleman when ye ask the dissent of ladies blockin' the way for
steppin' between them. Will ye bring the pig's face of ye out of the
windy and see to the food?'
Mrs. McCaskey arose heavily and went to the stove. There was
something in her manner that warned Mr. McCaskey. When the
corners of her mouth went down suddenly like a barometer it usually
foretold a fall of crockery and tinware.
'Pig's face, is it?' said Mrs. McCaskey, and hurled a stewpan full of
bacon and turnips at her lord.
Mr. McCaskey was no novice at repartee. He knew what should
follow the entree. On the table was a roast sirloin of pork, garnished
with shamrocks. He retorted with this, and drew the appropriate return
of a bread pudding in an earthen dish. A hunk of Swiss cheese
accurately thrown by her husband struck Mrs. McCaskey below one
eye. When she replied with a well-aimed coffee-pot full of a hot,
black, semi-fragrant liquid the battle, according to courses, should
have ended.
But Mr. McCaskey was no 50 cent table d'hôter. Let cheap
Bohemians consider coffee the end, if they would. Let them make
12 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

that faux pas. He was foxier still. Finger-bowls were not beyond the
compass of his experience. They were not to be had in the Pension
Murphy; but their equivalent was at hand. Triumphantly he sent the
granite-ware wash-basin at the head of his matrimonial adversary.
Mrs. McCaskey dodged in time. She reached for a flat-iron, with
which, as a sort of cordial, she hoped to bring the gastronomical duel
to a close. But a loud, wailing scream downstairs caused both her and
Mr. McCaskey to pause in a sort of involuntary armistice.
On the sidewalk at the corner of the house Policeman Cleary was
standing with one ear upturned, listening to the crash of household
utensils.'
'Tis Jawn McCaskey and his missus at it again,' meditated the
policeman. 'I wonder shall I go up and stop the row. I will not.
Married folks they are; and few pleasures they have. 'Twill not last
long. Sure, they'll have to borrow more dishes to keep it up with.'
And just then came the loud scream below-stairs, betokening fear or
dire extremity. ' 'Tis probably the cat,' said Policeman Cleary, and
walked hastily in the other direction.
The boarders on the steps were fluttered. Mr. Toomey, an insurance
solicitor by birth and an investigator by profession, went inside to
analyse the scream. He returned with the news that Mrs. Murphy's
little boy Mike was lost. Following the messenger, out bounced Mrs.
Murphy - two hundred pounds in tears and hysterics, clutching the air
and howling to the sky for the loss of thirty pounds of freckles and
mischief. Bathos, truly; but Mr. Toomey sat down at the side of Miss
Purdy, milliner, and their hands came together in sympathy. The two
old maids, Misses Walsh, who complained every day about the noise
in the halls, inquired immediately if anybody had looked behind the
clock.
Major Grigg, who sat by his fat wife on the top step, arose and
buttoned his coat. 'The little one lost?' he exclaimed. 'I will scour the
city.' His wife never allowed him out after dark. But now she said:
'Go, Ludovic!' in a baritone voice. 'Whoever can look upon that
mother's grief without springing to her relief has a heart of stone.'
'Give me some thirty or - sixty cents, my love,' said the Major. 'Lost
children sometimes stray far. I may need car-fares.'
Old man Denny, hall-room, fourth floor back, who sat on the lowest
step, trying to read a paper by the street lamp, turned over a page to
follow up the article about the carpenters' strike. Mrs. Murphy
shrieked to the moon: 'Oh, ar-r-Mike, f'r Gawd's sake, where is me
little bit av a boy?'
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 13

'When'd ye see him last?' asked old man Denny, with one eye on the
report of the Building Trades League.
'Oh,' wailed Mrs. Murphy,.' 'twas yisterday, or maybe four hours
ago! I dunno. But it's lost he is, me little boy Mike. He was playin' on
the sidewalk only this mornin' - or was it Wednesday? I'm that busy
with work 'tis hard to keep up with dates. But I've looked the house
over from top to cellar, and it's gone he is. Oh, for the love av Hiven -
'
Silent, grim, colossal, the big city has ever stood against its revilers.
They call it hard as iron; they say that no pulse of pity beats in its
bosom; they compare its streets with lonely forests and deserts of lava.
But beneath the hard crust of the lobster is found a delectable and
luscious food. Perhaps a different simile would have been wiser. Still,
nobody should take offence. We would call no one a lobster without
good and sufficient claws.
No calamity so touches the common heart of humanity as does the
straying of a little child. Their feet are so uncertain and feeble; the
ways are so steep and strange.
Major Griggs hurried down to the corner, and up the avenue into
Billy's place. 'Gimme a rye-high,' he said to the servitor. 'Haven't seen
a bow-legged, dirty-faced little devil of a six-yearold lost kid around
here anywhere, have you?'
Mr. Toomey retained Miss Purdy's hand on the steps. 'Think of that
dear little babe,' said Miss Purdy, 'lost from his mother's side - perhaps
already fallen beneath the iron hoofs of galloping steeds - oh, isn't it
dreadful?'
'Ain't that right?' agreed Mr. Toomey, squeezing her hand. 'Say I
start out and help look for um!'
'Perhaps,' said Miss Purdy, 'you should. But oh, Mr. Toomey, you
are so dashing - so reckless - suppose in your enthusiasm some
accident should befall you, then what - '
Old man Denny read on about the arbitration agreement, with one
finger on the lines.
In the second floor front Mr. and Mrs. McCaskey came to the
window to recover their second wind. Mr. McCaskey was scooping
turnips out of his vest with a crooked forefinger, and his lady was
wiping an eye that the salt of the roast pork had not benefited. They
heard the outcry below, and thrust their heads out of the window. '
'Tis little Mike is lost,' said Mrs. McCaskey in a hushed voice, 'the
beautiful, little, trouble-making angel of a gossoon!'
'The bit of a boy mislaid?' said Mr. McCaskey leaning out of
14 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

the window. 'Why, now, that's bad enough, entirely. The childer, they
be different. If 'twas a woman I'd be willin', for they leave peace
behind 'em when they go.'
Disregarding the thrust, Mrs. McCaskey caught her husband's arm.
'Jawn,' she said sentimentally, 'Missis Murphy's little bye is lost. 'Tis a
great city for losing little boys. Six years old he was. Jawn, 'tis the
same age our little bye would have been if we had had one six years
ago.' 'We never did,' said Mr. McCaskey, lingering with the fact. 'But
if we had, Jawn, think what sorrow would be in our hearts this night,
with our little Phelan run away and stolen in the city nowheres at all.'
'Ye talk foolishness,' said Mr. McCaskey. ' 'Tis Pat he would be
named, after me old father in Cantrim.' 'Ye lie!' said Mrs. McCaskey,
without anger. 'Me brother was worth tin dozen bog-trotting
McCaskeys. After him would the bye be named.' She leaned over the
window-sill and looked down at the hurrying and bustle below. 'Jawn,'
said Mrs. McCaskey softly, 'I'm sorry I was hasty wid ye.' ' 'Twas
hasty puddin', as ye say,' said her husband, 'and hurryup turnips and
get-a-move-on-ye coffee. 'Twas what ye could call a quick lunch, all
right, and tell no lie.' Mrs. McCaskey slipped her arm inside her
husband's and took his rough hand in hers. 'Listen at the cryin' of poor
Mrs. Murphy,' she said. ' 'Tis an awful thing for a bit of a bye to be
lost in this great big city. If 'twas our little Phelan, Jawn, I'd be
breakin' me heart.' Awkwardly Mr. McCaskey withdrew his hand. But
he laid it around the nearing shoulders of his wife. ' 'Tis foolishness, of
course,' said he, roughly, 'but I'd be cut up some meself, if our little -
Pat was kidnapped or anything. But there never was any childer for us.
Sometimes I've been ugly and hard with ye, Judy. Forget it.' They
leaned together, and looked down at the heart-drama being acted
below. Long they sat thus. People surged along the sidewalk,
crowding, questioning, filling the air with rumours and inconsequent
surmises. Mrs. Murphy ploughed back and forth in their midst, like a
soft mountain down which plunged an audible cataract of tears.
Couriers came and went.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 15

Loud voices and a renewed uproar were raised in front of the

boarding-house. 'What's up now, Judy?' asked Mr. McCaskey. ' 'Tis
Missis Murphy's voice,' said Mrs. McCaskey, harking. 'She says she's
after finding little Mike asleep behind the roll of old linoleum under
the bed in her room.' Mr. McCaskey laughed loudly. 'That's yer
Phelan,' he shouted sardonically 'Divil a bit would a Pat have done
that trick if the bye we never had is strayed and stole, by the powers,
call him Phelan, and see him hide out under the bed like a mangy pup.'
Mrs. McCaskey arose heavily, and went toward the dish closet, with
the corners of her mouth drawn down. Policeman Cleary came back
around the corner as the crowd dispersed. Surprised, he upturned an
ear toward the McCaskey apartment where the crash of irons and
chinaware and the ring of hurled kitchen utensils seemed as loud as
before. Policeman Cleary took out his timepiece. 'By the deported
snakes!' he exclaimed, 'Jawn McCaskey and his lady have been
fightin' for an hour and a quarter by the watch. The missis could give
him forty pounds weight. Strength to his arm.' Policeman Cleary
strolled back around the corner. Old man Denny folded his paper and
hurried up the steps just as Mrs. Murphy was about to lock the door
for the night.

IV
The Skylight Room
FIRST MRS . PARKER would show you the double parlours. You
would not dare to interrupt her description of their advantages and of
the merits of the gentleman who had occupied them for eight years.
Then you would manage to stammer forth the confession that you
were neither a doctor nor a dentist. Mrs. Parker's manner of receiving
the admission was such that you could never afterward entertain the
same feeling toward your parents, who had neglected to train you up
in one of the professions that fitted Mrs. Parker's parlours. Next you
ascended one flight of stairs and looked at the second floor back at $8.
Convinced by her second-floor manner that it
 16 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

was worth the $12 that Mr. Toosenberry always paid for it until he left
to take charge of his brother's orange plantation in Florida near Palm
Beach, where Mrs. McIntyre always spent the winters that had the
double front room with private bath, you managed to babble that you
wanted something still cheaper.
If you survived Mrs. Parker's scorn, you were taken to look at Mr.
Skidder's large hall-room on the third floor. Mr. Skidder's room was
not vacant. He wrote plays and smoked cigarettes in it all day long.
But every room-hunter was made to visit his room to admire the
lambrequins. After each visit, Mr. Skidder, from the fright caused by
possible eviction, would pay something on his rent.
Then - oh, then - if you still stood on one foot with your hot hand
clutching the three moist dollars in your pocket, and hoarsely
proclaimed your hideous and culpable poverty, nevermore would Mrs.
Parker be cicerone of yours. She would honk loudly the word 'Clara,'
she would show you her back, and march downstairs. Then Clara, the
coloured maid, would escort you up the carpeted ladder that served for
the fourth flight, and show you the Skylight Room. It occupied 7 by 8
feet of floorspace at the middle of the hall. On each side of it was a
dark lumber closet or store-room.
In it was an iron cot, a washstand and a chair. A shelf was the
dresser. Its four bare walls seemed to close in upon you like the sides
of a coin. Your hand crept to your throat, you gasped, you looked up
as from a well - and breathed once more. Through the glass of the
little skylight you saw a square of blue infinity.
'Two dollars, suh,' Clara would say in her half-contemptuous, half-
Tuskegeenial tones.
One day Miss Leeson came hunting for a room. She carried a
typewriter made to be lugged around by a much larger lady. She was a
very little girl, with eyes and hair that kept on growing after she had
stopped and that always looked as if they were saying: 'Goodness me.
Why didn't you keep up with us?'
Mrs. Parker showed her the double parlours. 'In this closet,' she
said, 'one could keep a skeleton or anaesthetic or coal - ' 'But I am
neither a doctor nor a dentist,' said Miss Leeson with a shiver. Mrs.
Parker gave her the incredulous, pitying, sneering, icy stare that she
kept for those who failed to qualify as doctors or dentists, and led the
way to the second floor back.
'Eight dollars?' said Miss Leeson. 'Dear me! I'm not Hetty if I
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 17

do look green. I'm just a poor little working girl. Show me something
higher and lower.'
Mr. Skidder jumped and strewed the floor with cigarette stubs at
the rap on his door.
'Excuse me, Mr. Skidder,' said Mrs. Parker, with her demon's
smile at his pale looks. 'I didn't know you were in. I asked the lady to
have a look at your lambrequins.'
'They're too lovely for anything,' said Miss Leeson, smiling in
exactly the way the angels do. After they had gone Mr. Skidder got
very busy erasing the tall, black-haired heroine from his latest
(unproduced) play and inserting a small, roguish one with heavy,
bright hair and vivacious features.
'Anna Held'll jump at it,' said Mr. Skidder to himself, putting his
feet up against the lambrequins and disappearing in a cloud of smoke
like an aerial cuttlefish.
Presently the tocsin call of 'Clara!' sounded to the world the state
of Miss Leeson's purse. A dark goblin seized her, mounted a Stygian
stairway, thrust her into a vault with a glimmer of light in its top and
muttered the menacing and cabalistic words 'Two dollars!'
'I'll take it!' sighed Miss Leeson, sinking down upon the squeaky
iron bed.
Every day Miss Leeson went out to work. At night she brought
home papers with handwriting on them and made copies with her
typewriter. Sometimes she had no work at night, and then she would
sit on the steps of the high stoop with the other roomers. Miss Leeson
was not intended for a skylight room when the plans were drawn for
her creation. She was gay-hearted and full of tender, whimsical
fancies. Once she let Mr. Skidder read to her three acts of his great
(unpublished) comedy, 'It's No Kid; or, The Heir of the Subway.'
There was rejoicing among the gentlemen roomers whenever Miss
Leeson had time to sit on the steps for an hour or two. But Miss
Longnecker, the tall blonde who taught in a public school and said
'Well, really!' to everything you said, sat on the top step and sniffed.
And Miss Dorn, who shot at the moving ducks at Coney every Sunday
and worked in a department store, sat on the bottom step and sniffed.
Miss Leeson sat on the middle step, and the men would quickly group
around her.
Especially Mr. Skidder, who had cast her in his mind for the star
part in a private, romantic (unspoken) drama in real life. And
 18 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

especially Mr. Hoover, who was forty-five, fat, flushed and foolish.
And especially very young Mr. Evans, who set up a hollow cough to
induce her to ask him to leave off cigarettes. The men voted her 'the
funniest and jolliest ever,' but the sniffs on the top step and the lower
step were implacable.

•••••

I pray you let the drama halt while Chorus stalks to the footlights
and drops an epicedian tear upon the fatness of Mr. Hoover. Tune the
pipes to the tragedy of tallow, the bane of bulk, the calamity of
corpulence. Tried out, Falstaff might have rendered more romance to
the ton than would have Romeo's rickety ribs to the ounce. A lover
may sigh, but he must not puff. To the train of Momus are the fat men
remanded. In vain beats the faithfullest heart above a 52-inch belt.
Avaunt, Hoover! Hoover, forty-five, flush and foolish, might carry off
Helen herself; Hoover, fortyfive, flush, foolish and fat, is meat for
perdition. There was never a chance for you, Hoover.
As Mrs. Parker's roomers sat thus one summer's evening, Miss
Leeson looked up into the firmament and cried with her little gay
laugh:
'Why, there's Billy Jackson! I can see him from down here, too.'
All looked up - some at the windows of skyscrapers, some casting
about for an airship, Jackson-guided.
'It's that star,' explained Miss Leeson, pointing with a tiny finger.
'Not the big one that twinkles - the steady blue one near it. I can see it
every night through my skylight. I named it Billy Jackson.'
'Well, really!' said Miss Longnecker. 'I didn't know you were an
astronomer, Miss Leeson.'
'Oh, yes,' said the small star-gazer, 'I know as much as any of them
about the style of sleeves they're going to wear next fall in Mars.'
'Well, really!' said Miss Longnecker. 'The star you refer to is
Gamma, of the constellation Cassiopeia. It is nearly of the second
magnitude, and its meridian passage is - '
'Oh,' said the very young Mr. Evans, 'I think Billy Jackson is a
much better name for it.
'Same here,' said Mr. Hoover, loudly breathing defiance to Miss
Longnecker. 'I think Miss Leeson has just as much right to name stars
as any of those old astrologers had.'
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 19

'Well, really!' said Miss Longnecker.

'I wonder whether it's a shooting star,' remarked Miss Dorn. 'I hit
nine ducks and a rabbit out of ten in the gallery at Coney Sunday.'
'He doesn't show up very well from down here,' said Miss Leeson.
'You ought to see him from my room. You know you can see stars
even in the daytime from the bottom of a well. At night my room is
like the shaft of a coal-mine, and it makes Billy Jackson look like the
big diamond pin that Night fastens her kimono with.'
There came a time after that when Miss Leeson brought no
formidable papers home to copy. And when she went in the morning,
instead of working, she went from office to office and let her heart
melt away in the drip of cold refusals transmitted through insolent
office boys. This went on. There came an evening when she wearily
climbed Mrs. Parker's stoop at the hour when she always returned
from her dinner at the restaurant. But she had had no dinner.
As she stepped into the hall Mr. Hoover met her and seized his
chance. He asked her to marry him, and his fatness hovered above her
like an avalanche. She dodged, and caught the balustrade. He tried for
her hand, and she raised it and smote him weakly in the face. Step by
step she went up, dragging herself by the railing. She passed Mr.
Skidder's door as he was red-inking a stage direction for Myrtle
Delorme (Miss Leeson) in his (unaccepted) comedy, to 'pirouette
across stage from L to the side of the Count.' Up the carpeted ladder
she crawled at last and opened the door of the skylight room.
She was too weak to light the lamp or to undress. She fell upon the
iron cot, her fragile body scarcely hollowing the worn springs. And in
that Erebus of a room she slowly raised her heavy eyelids, and smiled.
For Billy Jackson was shining down on her, calm and bright and
constant through the skylight. There was no world about her. She was
sunk in a pit of blackness, with but that small square of pallid light
framing the star that she had so whimsically, and oh, so ineffectually,
named. Miss Longnecker must be right; it was Gamma, of the
constellation Cassiopeia, and not Billy Jackson. And yet she could not
let it be Gamma.
As she lay on her back she tried twice to raise her arm. The third
time she got two thin fingers to her lips and blew a kiss out of the
black pit to Billy Jackson. Her arm fell back limply.
'Good-bye, Billy,' she murmured faintly. 'You're millions of
 20 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

miles away and you won't even twinkle once. But you kept where I
could see you most of the time up there when there wasn't anything
else but darkness to look at, didn't you? . . . Millions of miles... .
Good-bye, Billy Jackson.'
Clara, the coloured maid, found the door locked at ten the next day,
and they forced it open. Vinegar, and the slapping of wrists and even
burnt feathers, proving of no avail, someone ran to 'phone for an
ambulance. In due time it backed up to the door with much gong-
clanging, and the capable young medico, in his white linen coat,
ready, active, confident, with his smooth face half debonair, half grim,
danced up the steps.
'Ambulance call to 49,' he said briefly. 'What's the trouble?'
'Oh yes, doctor,' sniffed Mrs. Parker, as though her trouble that there
should be trouble in the house was the greater. 'I can't think what can
be the matter with her. Nothing we could do would bring her to. It's a
young woman, a Miss Elsie - yes, a Miss Elsie Leeson. Never before
in my house - '
'What room?' cried the doctor in a terrible voice, to which Mrs.
Parker was a stranger.
'The skylight room. It -'
Evidently the ambulance doctor was familiar with the location of
skylight rooms. He was gone up the stairs, four at a time. Mrs. Parker
followed slowly, as her dignity demanded.
On the first landing she met him coming back bearing the
astronomer in his arms. He stopped and let loose the practised scalpel
of his tongue, not loudly. Gradually Mrs. Parker crumpled as a stiff
garment that slips down from a nail. Ever afterwards there remained
crumples in her mind and body. Sometimes her curious roomers
would ask her what the doctor said to her.
'Let that be,' she would answer. 'If I can get forgiveness for having
heard it I will be satisfied.'
The ambulance physician strode with his burden through the pack of
hounds that follow the curiosity chase, and even they fell back along
the sidewalk abashed, for his face was that of one who bears his own
dead.
They noticed that he did not lay down upon the bed prepared for it
in the ambulance the form that he carried, and all that he said was:
'Drive like h - l, Wilson,' to the driver.
That is all. Is it a story? In the next morning's paper I saw a little
news item, and the last sentence of it may help you (as it helped me)
to weld the incidents together.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 21

It recounted the reception into Bellevue Hospital of a young woman

who had been removed from No. 49 East - Street, suffering from
debility induced by starvation. It concluded with these words: 'Dr.
William Jackson, the ambulance physician who attended the case,
says the patient will recover.'
V
A Service of Love

WHEN ONE LOVES ONES ART no service seems too hard.

That is our premise. This story shall draw a conclusion from it, and
show at the same time that the premise is incorrect. That will be a new
thing in logic, and a feat in story-telling somewhat older than the
Great Wall of China.
Joe Larrabee came out of the post-oak flats of the Middle West
pulsing with a genius for pictorial art. At six he drew a picture of the
town pump with a prominent citizen passing it hastily. This effort was
framed and hung in the drug store window by the side of the ear of
corn with an uneven number of rows. At twenty he left for New York
with a flowing necktie and a capital tied up somewhat closer.
Delia Caruthers did things in six octaves so promisingly in a pine-
tree village in the South that her relatives chipped in enough in her
chip hat for her to go 'North' and 'finish.' They could not see her f -,
but that is our story Joe and Delia met in an atelier where a number of
art and music students had gathered to discuss chiaroscuro, Wagner,
music, Rembrandt's works pictures, Waldteufel, wall-paper, Chopin,
and Oolong.
Joe and Delia became enamoured one of the other or each of the
other, as you please, and in a short time were married - for (see
above), when one loves one's Art no service seem too hard.
Mr. and Mrs. Larrabee began housekeeping in a flat. It was a
lonesome flat - something like the A sharp way down at the lefthand
end of the keyboard. And they were happy; for they had their Art and
they had each other. And my advice to the rich young man would be -
sell all thou hast, and give it to the poor - janitor for the privilege of
living in a flat with your Art and your Delia.
Flat-dwellers shall endorse my dictum that theirs is the only
 22 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

true happiness. If a home is happy it cannot fit too close - let the
dresser collapse and become a billiard table; let the mantel turn to a
rowing machine, the escritoire to a spare bedchamber, the washstand
to an upright piano; let the four walls come together, if they will, so
you and your Delia are between. But if home be the other kind, let it
be wide and long - enter you at the Golden Gate, hang your hat on
Hatteras, your cape on Cape Horn, and go out by Labrador.
Joe was painting in the class of the great Magister - you know his
fame. His fees are high; his lessons are light - his high-lights have
brought him renown. Delia was studying under Rosenstock - you
know his repute as a disturber of the piano keys.
They were mighty happy as long as their money lasted. So is every -
but I will not be cynical. Their aims were very clear and defined. Joe
was to become capable very soon of turning out pictures that old
gentlemen with thin side-whiskers and thick pocketbooks would
sandbag one another in his studio for the privilege of buying. Delia
was to become familiar and then contemptuous with Music, so that
when she saw the orchestra seats and boxes unsold she could have
sore throat and lobster in a private dining-room and refuse to go on the
stage.
But the best, in my opinion, was the home life in the little flat - the
ardent, voluble chats after the day's study; the cosy dinners and fresh,
light breakfasts; the interchange of ambitions - ambitions interwoven
each with the other's or else inconsiderable - the mutual help and
inspiration; and - overlook my artlessness - stuffed olives and cheese
sandwiches at 11p.m.
But after awhile Art flagged. It sometimes does, even if some
switchman doesn't flag it. Everything going out and nothing coming
in, as the vulgarians say. Money was lacking to pay Mr. Magister and
Herr Rosenstock their prices. When one loves one's Art no service
seems too hard. So, Delia said she must give music lessons to keep the
chafing dish bubbling.
For two or three days she went out canvassing for pupils. One
evening she came home elated.
'Joe, dear,' she said gleefully, 'I've a pupil. And, oh, the loveliest
people! General - General A. B. Pinkney's daughter - on Seventyfirst
Street. Such a splendid house, Joe - you ought to see the front door!
Byzantine I think you would call it. And inside! Oh, Joe, I never saw
anything like it before.
'My pupil is his daughter Clementina. I dearly love her already.
She's a delicate thing - dresses always in white; and the sweetest,
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 23

simplest manners! Only eighteen years old. I'm to give three lessons a
week; and, just think, Joe! $5 a lesson. I don't mind it a bit; for when I
get two or three more pupils I can resume my lessons with Herr
Rosenstock. Now, smooth out that wrinkle between your brows, dear,
and let's have a nice supper.'
'That's all right for you, Dele,' said Joe, attacking a can of peas with
a carving knife and a hatchet, 'but how about me? Do you think I'm
going to let you hustle for wages while I philander in the regions of
high art? Not by the bones of Benvenuto Cellini! I guess I can sell
papers or lay cobblestones, and bring in a dollar or two.'
Delia came and hung about his neck.
'Joe, dear, you are silly. You must keep on at your studies. It is not
as if I had quit my music and gone to work at something else. While I
teach I learn. I am always with my music. And we can live as happily
as millionaires on $15 a week. You mustn't think of leaving Mr.
Magister.'
'All right,' said Joe, reaching for the blue scalloped vegetable dish.
'But I hate for you to be giving lessons. It isn't Art. But you're a trump
and a dear to do it.' 'When one loves one's Art no service seems too
hard,' said Delia.
'Magister praised the sky in that sketch I made in the park,' said Joe.
'And Tinkle gave me permission to hang two of them in his window. I
may sell one if the right kind of a moneyed idiot sees them.'
'I'm sure you will,' said Delia sweetly. 'And now let's be thankful for
General Pinkney and this veal roast.' During all of the next week the
Larrabees had an early breakfast. Joe was enthusiastic about some
morning-effect sketches he was doing in Central Park, and Delia
packed him off breakfasted, coddled, praised, and kissed at seven
o'clock. Art is an engaging mistress. It was most times seven o'clock
when he returned in the evening.
At the end of the week Delia, sweetly proud but languid,
triumphantly tossed three five-dollar bills on the 8 by 10 (inches)
centre table of the 8 by 10 (feet) flat parlour.
'Sometimes,' she said, a little wearily, 'Clementina tries me. I'm
afraid she doesn't practise enough, and I have to tell her the same
things so often. And then she always dresses entirely in white, and that
does get monotonous. But General Pinkney is the dearest old man! I
wish you could know him, Joe. He comes in sometimes
 24 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

when I am with Clementina at the piano - he is a widower, you know -

and stands there pulling his white goatee. "And how are the
semiquavers and the demi-semiquavers progressing?" he always asks.
'I wish you could see the wainscoting in that drawing-room, Joe!
And those Astrakhan rug portières. And Clementina has such a funny
little cough. I hope she is stronger than she looks. Oh, I really am
getting attached to her, she is so gentle and high bred. General
Pinkney's brother was once Minister to Bolivia.'
And then Joe, with the air of a Monte Cristo, drew forth a ten, a five,
a two and a one - all legal tender notes - and laid them beside Delia's
earnings.
'Sold that water-colour of the obelisk to a man from Peoria,' he
announced overwhelmingly.
'Don't joke with me,' said Delia - 'not from Peoria!'
'All the way. I wish you could see him, Dele. Fat man with a
woollen muffler and a quill toothpick. He saw the sketch in Tinkle's
window and thought it was a windmill at first. He was game, though,
and bought it anyhow. He ordered another - an oil sketch of the
Lackawanna freight depot - to take back with him. Music lessons! Oh,
I guess Art is still in it.'
'I'm so glad you've kept on,' said Delia heartily. 'You're bound to
win, dear. Thirty-three dollars! We never had so much to spend
before. We'll have oysters to-night.'
'And filet mignon with champignons,' said Joe. 'Where is the olive
fork?'
On the next Saturday evening Joe reached home first. He spread his
$18 on the parlour table and washed what seemed to be a great deal of
dark paint from his hands.
Half an hour later Delia arrived, her right hand tied up in a shapeless
bundle of wraps and bandages.
'How is this?' asked Joe after the usual greetings.
Delia laughed, but not very joyously.
'Clementina,' she explained, 'insisted upon a Welsh rabbit after her
lesson. She is such a queer girl. Welsh rabbits at five in the afternoon.
The General was there. You should have seen him run for the chafing
dish, Joe, just as if there wasn't a servant in the house. I know
Clementina isn't in good health; she is so nervous. In serving the
rabbit she spilled a great lot of it, boiling hot, over my hand and wrist.
It hurt awfully, Joe. And the dear girl was so sorry! But General
Pinkney! - Joe, that old man nearly went distracted. He rushed
downstairs and sent somebody - they said the
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 25

furnace man or somebody in the basement - out to a drug store for

some oil and things to bind it up with. It doesn't hurt so much now.'
'What's this?' asked Joe, taking the hand tenderly and pulling at
some white strands beneath the bandages.
'It's something soft,' said Delia, 'that had oil on it. Oh, Joe, did you
sell another sketch?' She had seen the money on the table.
'Did I?' said Joe. 'Just ask the man from Peoria. He got his depot to-
day, and he isn't sure but he thinks he wants another parkscape and a
view on the Hudson. What time this afternoon did you burn your
hand, Dele?'
'Five o'clock, I think,' said Dele plaintively. 'The iron - I mean the
rabbit came off the fire about that time. You ought to have seen
General Pinkney, Joe, when - '
'Sit down here a moment, Dele,' said Joe. He drew her to the couch,
sat down beside her and put his arm across her shoulders.
'What have you been doing for the last two weeks, Dele?' he asked.
She braved it for a moment or two with an eye full of love and
stubbornness, and murmured a phrase or two vaguely of General
Pinkney; but at length down went her head and out came the truth and
tears.
'I couldn't get any pupils,' she confessed. 'And I couldn't bear to have
you give up your lessons; and I got a place ironing shirts in that big
Twenty-fourth Street laundry. And I think I did very well to make up
both General Pinkney and Clementina, don't you, Joe? And when a
girl in the laundry set down a hot iron on my hand this afternoon I was
all the way home making up that story about the Welsh rabbit. You're
not angry are you, Joe? And if I hadn't got the work you mightn't have
sold your sketches to that man from Peoria.'
'He wasn't from Peoria,' said Joe slowly.
'Well, it doesn't matter where he was from. How clever you are, Joe
- and - kiss me, Joe - and what made you ever suspect that I wasn't
giving music lessons to Clementina?'
'I didn't,' said Joe, 'until to-night. And I wouldn't have then, only I
sent up this cotton waste and oil from the engine-room this afternoon
for a girl upstairs who had her hand burned with a smoothing-iron.
I've been firing the engine in that laundry for the last two weeks.'
'And then you didn't - '
'My purchaser from Peoria,' said Joe, 'and General Pinkney are
 26 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

both creations of the same art - but you wouldn't call it either painting
or music. And then they both laughed, and Joe began: 'When one
loves one's Art no service seems - ' But Delia stopped him with her
hand on his lips. 'No,' she said - 'just "When one loves." '

VI

The Coming-out of Maggie

EVERY SATURDAY NIGHT the Clover Leaf Social Club gave a

hop in the hall of the Give and Take Athletic Association on the East
Side. In order to attend one of these dances you must be a member of
the Give and Take - or, if you belong to the division that starts off
with the right foot in waltzing, you must work in Rhinegold's paper-
box factory. Still, any Clover Leaf was privileged to escort or be
escorted by an outsider to a single dance. But mostly each Give and
Take brought the paper-box girl that he affected; and few strangers
could boast of having shaken a foot at the regular hops.
Maggie Toole, on account of her dull eyes, broad mouth and left-
handed style of footwork in the two-step, went to the dances with
Anna McCarty and her 'fellow.' Anna and Maggie worked side by side
in the factory, and were the greatest chums ever. So Anna always
made Jimmy Burns take her by Maggie's house every Saturday night
so that her friend could go to the dance with them.
The Give and Take Athletic Association lived up to its name. The
hall of the association in Orchard Street was fitted out with
musclemaking inventions. With the fibres thus builded up the
members were wont to engage the police and rival social and athletic
organizations in joyous combat. Between these more serious
occupations the Saturday night hops with the paper-box factory girls
came as a refining influence and as an efficient screen. For sometimes
the tip went 'round, and if you were among the elect that tiptoed up the
dark back stairway you might see as neat and satisfying a little welter-
weight affair to a finish as ever happened inside the ropes.
On Saturdays Rhinegold's paper-box factory closed at 3 p.m. On
one such afternoon Anna and Maggie walked homeward together. At
Maggie's door Anna said, as usual: 'Be ready at seven, sharp, Mag;
and Jimmy and me'll come by for you.'
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 27

But what was this? Instead of the customary humble and grateful
thanks from the non-escorted one there was to be perceived a high-
poised head, a prideful dimpling at the corners of a broad mouth, and
almost a sparkle in a dull brown eye.
'Thanks, Anna,' said Maggie; 'but you and Jimmy needn't bother
to-night. I've a gentleman friend that's coming 'round to escort me to
the hop.'
The comely Anna pounced upon her friend, shook her, chided and
beseeched her. Maggie Toole catch a fellow! Plain, dear, loyal,
unattractive Maggie, so sweet as a chum, so unsought for a two-step
or a moonlit bench in the little park. How was it? When did it happen?
Who was it?
'You'll see to-night,' said Maggie, flushed with the wine of the first
grapes she had gathered in Cupid's vineyard. 'He's swell all right. He's
two inches taller than Jimmy, and an up-to-date dresser. I'll introduce
him, Anna, just as soon as we get to the hall.'
Anna and Jimmy were among the first Clover Leafs to arrive that
evening. Anna's eyes were brightly fixed upon the door of the hall to
catch the first glimpse of her friend's 'catch.'
At 8.30 Miss Toole swept into the hall with her escort. Quickly
her triumphant eye discovered her chum under the wing of her faithful
Jimmy.
'Oh, gee!' cried Anna, 'Mag ain't made a hit - oh, no! Swell fellow?
Well, I guess! Style? Look at 'um.'
'Go as far as you like,' said Jimmy, with sandpaper in his voice.
'Cop him out if you want him. These new guys always win out with
the push. Don't mind me. He don't squeeze all the limes, I guess. Huh!'
'Shut up, Jimmy. You know what I mean. I'm glad for Mag. First
fellow she ever had. Oh, here they come.'
Across the floor Maggie sailed like a coquettish yacht convoyed
by a stately cruiser. And truly, her companion justified the encomiums
of the faithful chum. He stood two inches taller than the average Give
and Take athlete; his dark hair curled; his eyes and his teeth flashed
whenever he bestowed his frequent smiles. The young men of the
Clover Leaf Club pinned not their faith to the graces of person as
much as they did to its prowess, its achievements in hand-to-hand
conflicts, and its preservation from the legal duress that constantly
menaced it. The member of the association who would bind a paper-
box maiden to his conquering chariot scorned to employ Beau
Brummel airs. They were not considered honourable methods of
warfare. The swelling biceps,
 28 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

the coat straining at its buttons over the chest, the air of conscious
conviction of the super-eminence of the male in the cosmogony of
creation, even a calm display of bow legs as subduing and enchanting
agents in the gentle tourneys of Cupid - these were the approved arms
and ammunition of the Clover Leaf gallants. They viewed, then, the
genuflexions and alluring poses of this visitor with their chins at a new
angle.
'A friend of mine, Mr. Terry O'Sullivan,' was Maggie's formula of
introduction. She led him around the room, presenting him to each
new-arriving Clover Leaf. Almost was she pretty now, with the unique
luminosity in her eyes that comes to a girl with her first suitor and a
kitten with its first mouse.
'Maggie Toole's got a fellow at last,' was the word that went round
among the paper-box girls. 'Pipe Mag's floor-walker' - thus the Give
and Takes expressed their indifferent contempt.
Usually at the weekly hops Maggie kept a spot on the wall warm
with her back. She felt and showed so much gratitude whenever a self-
sacrificing partner invited her to dance that his pleasure was
cheapened and diminished. She had even grown used to noticing Anna
joggle the reluctant Jimmy with her elbow as a signal for him to invite
her chum to walk over his feet through a two-step.
But to-night the pumpkin had turned to a coach and six. Terry
O'Sullivan was a victorious Prince Charming, and Maggie Toole
winged her first butterfly flight. And though our tropes of fairyland be
mixed with those of entomology they shall not spill one drop of
ambrosia from the rose-crowned melody of Maggie's one perfect
night.
The girls besieged her for introductions to her 'fellow.' The
Clover Leaf young men, after two years of blindness, suddenly
perceived charms in Miss Toole. They flexed their compelling
muscles before her and bespoke her for the dance.
Thus she scored; but to Terry O'Sullivan the honours of the
evening fell thick and fast. He shook his curls; he smiled and went
easily through the seven motions for acquiring grace in your own
room before an open window ten minutes each day. He danced like a
faun; he introduced manner and style and atmosphere; his words came
trippingly upon his tongue, and - he waltzed twice in succession with
the paper-box girl that Dempsey Donovan brought.
Dempsey was the leader of the association. He wore a dress suit,
and could chin the bar twice with one hand. He was one of 'Big Mike'
O'Sullivan's lieutenants, and was never troubled by trouble. No cop
dared to arrest him. Whenever he broke a push-cart man's
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 29

head or shot a member of the Heinrick B. Sweeney Outing and

Literary Association in the kneecap, an officer would drop around and
say:
'The Cap'n'd like to see ye a few minutes round to the office whin
ye have time, Dempsey, me boy.'
But there would be sundry gentlemen there with large gold fob
chains and black cigars; and somebody would tell a funny story, and
then Dempsey would go back and work half an hour with the six-
pound dumb-bells. So, doing a tight-rope act on a wire stretched
across Niagara was a safe terpsichorean performance compared with
waltzing twice with Dempsey Donovan's paperbox girl. At ten o'clock
the jolly round face of 'Big Mike' O'Sullivan shone at the door for five
minutes upon the scene. He always looked in for five minutes, smiled
at the girls and handed out real perfectos to the delighted boys.
Dempsey Donovan was at his elbow instantly, talking rapidly.
'Big Mike' looked carefully at the dancers, smiled, shook his head and
departed.
The music stopped. The dancers scattered to the chairs along the
walls. Terry O'Sullivan, with his entrancing bow, relinquished a pretty
girl in blue to her partner and started back to find Maggie. Dempsey
intercepted him in the middle of the floor.
Some fine instinct that Rome must have bequeathed to us caused
nearly every one to turn and look at them - there was a subtle feeling
that two gladiators had met in the arena. Two or three Give and Takes
with tight coat-sleeves drew nearer.
'One moment, Mr. O'Sullivan,' said Dempsey. 'I hope you're
enjoying yourself. Where did you say you lived?
The two gladiators were well matched. Dempsey had, perhaps, ten
pounds of weight to give away. The O'Sullivan had breadth with
quickness. Dempsey had a glacial eye, a dominating slit of a mouth,
an indestructible jaw, a complexion like a belle's and the coolness of a
champion. The visitor showed more fire in his contempt and less
control over his conspicuous sneer. They were enemies by the law
written when the rocks were molten. They were each too splendid, too
mighty, too incomparable to divide preeminence. One only must
survive.
'I live on Grand,' said O'Sullivan insolently; 'and no trouble to find
me at home. Where do you live?' Dempsey ignored the question.
'You say your name's O'Sullivan,' he went on. 'Well, "Big Mike"
says he never saw you before.'
 30 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'Lots of things he never saw,' said the favourite of the hop.

'As a rule,' went on Dempsey, huskily sweet, 'O'Sullivans in this
district know one another. You escorted one of our lady members
here, and we want a chance to make good. If you've got a family tree
let's see a few historical O'Sullivan buds come out on it. Or do you
want us to dig it out of you by the roots?'
'Suppose you mind your own business,' suggested O'Sullivan
blandly.
Dempsey's eyes brightened. He held up an inspired forefinger as
though a brilliant idea had struck him.
'I've got it now,' he said cordially. 'It was just a little mistake. You
ain't no O'Sullivan. You are a ring-tailed monkey. Excuse us for not
recognizing you at first.'
O'Sullivan's eye flashed. He made a quick movement, but Andy
Geoghan was ready and caught his arm.
Dempsey nodded at Andy and William McMahan, the secretary of
the club, and walked rapidly toward a door at the rear of the hall. Two
other members of the Give and Take Association swiftly joined the
little group. Terry O'Sullivan was now in the hands of the Board of
Rules and Social Referees. They spoke to him briefly and softly, and
conducted him out through the same door at the rear.
This movement on the part of the Clover Leaf members requires a
word of elucidation. Back of the association hall was a smaller room
rented by the club. In this room personal difficulties that arose on the
ballroom floor were settled, man to man, with the weapons of nature,
under the supervision of the Board. No lady could say that she had
witnessed a fight at a Clover Leaf hop in several years. Its gentlemen
members guaranteed that.
So easily and smoothly had Dempsey and the Board done their
preliminary work that many in the hall had not noticed the checking of
the fascinating O'Sullivan's social triumph. Among these was Maggie.
She looked about for her escort.
'Smoke up!' said Rose Cassidy. 'Wasn't you on? Demps Donovan
picked a scrap with your Lizzie-boy, and they've waltzed out to the
slaughter-room with him. How's my hair look done up this way, Mag?'
Maggie laid a hand on the bosom of her cheesecloth waist.
'Gone to fight with Dempsey!' she said breathlessly. 'They've got
to be stopped. Dempsey Donovan can't fight him. Why, he'll - he'll kill
him!'
'Ah, what do you care?' said Rosa. 'Don't some of 'em fight every
hop?'
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 31

But Maggie was off, darting her zigzag way through the maze of
dancers. She burst through the rear door into the dark hall and then
threw her solid shoulder against the door of the room of single
combat. It gave way, and in the instant that she entered her eye caught
the scene - the Board standing about with open watches; Dempsey
Donovan in his shirt-sleeves dancing, lightfooted, with the wary grace
of the modern pugilist, within easy reach of his adversary; Terry
O'Sullivan standing with arm folded and a murderous look in his dark
eyes. And without slacking the speed of her entrance she leaped
forward with a scream - leaped in time to catch and hang upon the arm
of O'Sullivan that was suddenly uplifted, and to whisk from it the
long, bright stiletto that he had drawn from his bosom.
The knife fell and rang upon the floor. Cold steel drawn in the
rooms of the Give and Take Association! Such a thing had never
happened before. Every one stood motionless for a minute. Andy
Geoghan kicked the stiletto with the toe of his shoe curiously, like an
antiquarian who has come upon some ancient weapon unknown to his
learning.
And then O'Sullivan hissed something unintelligible between his
teeth. Dempsey and the Board exchanged looks. And then Dempsey
looked at O'Sullivan without anger as one looks at a stray dog, and
nodded his head in the direction of the door.
'The back stairs, Giuseppi,' he said briefly. 'Somebody'll pitch
your hat down after you.'
Maggie walked up to Dempsey Donovan. There was a brilliant
spot of red in her cheeks, down which slow tears were running. But
she looked him bravely in the eye.
'I knew it, Dempsey,' she said, as her eyes grew dull even in their
tears. 'I knew he was a Guinea. His name's Tony Spinelli. I hurried in
when they told me you and him was scrappin'. Them Guineas always
carries knives. But you don't understand, Dempsey. I never had a
fellow in my life. I got tired of comin' with Anna and Jimmy every
night, so I fixed it with him to call himself O'Sullivan, and brought
him along. I knew there'd be nothin' doin' for him if he came as a
Dago. I guess I'll resign from the club now.'
Dempsey turned to Andy Geoghan.
'Chuck that cheese slicer out of the window,' he said, 'and tell 'em
inside that Mr. O'Sullivan has had a telephone message to go down to
Tammany Hall.'
And then he turned back to Maggie.
 32 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'Say, Mag,' he said, 'I'll see you home. And how about next
Saturday night? Will you come to the hop with me if I call around for
you?'
It was remarkable how quickly Maggie's eyes could change from
dull to a shining brown.
'With you, Dempsey?' she stammered. 'Say - will a duck swim?'

VII

The Cop and the Anthem

O N HIS BENCH IN MADISON SQUARE Soapy moved uneasily.

When wild goose honk high of nights, and when women without
sealskin coats grow kind to their husbands, and when Soapy moves
uneasily on his bench in the park, you may know that winter is near at
hand.
A dead leaf fell in Soapy's lap. That was Jack Frost's card. Jack is
kind to the regular denizens of Madison Square, and gives fair
warning of his annual call. At the corners of four streets he hands his
pasteboard to the North Wind, footman of the mansion of All
Outdoors, so that the inhabitants thereof may make ready.
Soapy's mind became cognizant of the fact that the time had come
for him to resolve himself into a singular Committee of Ways and
Means to provide against the coming rigour. And therefore he moved
uneasily on his bench.
The hibernatorial ambitions of Soapy were not of the highest. In
them were no considerations of Mediterranean cruises, of soporific
Southern skies or drifting in the Vesuvian Bay. Three months on the
Island was what his soul craved. Three months of assured board and
bed and congenial company, safe from Boreas and bluecoats, seemed
to Soapy the essence of things desirable.
For years the hospitable Blackwell's had been his winter quarters.
Just as his more fortunate fellow New Yorkers had bought their tickets
to Palm Beach and the Riviera each winter, so Soapy had made his
humble arrangements for his annual hegira to the Island. And now the
time was come. On the previous night three Sabbath newspapers,
distributed beneath his coat, about his ankles and over his lap, had
failed to repulse the cold as he slept on his bench near the spurting
fountain in the ancient square. So the Island loomed large and timely
in Soapy's mind. He scorned the provisions made in the name of
charity for the city's dependents.

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 33

In Soapy's opinion the Law was more benign than Philanthropy. There
was an endless round of institutions, municipal and eleemosynary, on
which he might set out and receive lodging and food accordant with
the simple life. But to one of Soapy's proud spirit the gifts of charity
are encumbered. If not in coin you must pay in humiliation of spirit
for every benefit received at the hands of philanthropy. As Caesar had
his Brutus, every bed of charity must have its toll of a bath, every loaf
of bread its compensation of a private and personal inquisition.
Wherefore it is better to be a guest of the law, which, though
conducted by rules, does not meddle unduly with a gentleman's
private affairs.
Soapy, having decided to go to the Island, at once set about
accomplishing his desire. There were many easy ways of doing this.
The pleasantest was to dine luxuriously at some expensive restaurant;
and then, after declaring insolvency, be handed over quietly and
without uproar to a policeman. An accommodating magistrate would
do the rest.
Soapy left his bench and strolled out of the square and across the
level sea of asphalt, where Broadway and Fifth Avenue flow together,
Up Broadway he turned, and halted at a glittering café, where are
gathered together nightly the choicest products of the grape, the
silkworm and the protoplasm.
Soapy had confidence in himself from the lowest button of his
vest upward. He was shaven, and his coat was decent and his neat
black, ready-tied four-in-hand had been presented to him by a lady
missionary on Thanksgiving Day. If he could reach a table in the
restaurant unsuspected success would be his. The portion of him that
would show above the table would raise no doubt in the waiter's mind.
A roasted mallard duck, thought Soapy, would be about the thing -
with a bottle of Chablis, and then Camembert, a demi-tasse and a
cigar. One dollar for the cigar would be enough. The total would not
be so high as to call forth any supreme manifestation of revenge from
the café management; and yet the meat would leave him filled and
happy for the journey to his winter refuge.
But as Soapy set foot inside the restaurant door the head waiter's
eye fell upon his frayed trousers and decadent shoes. Strong and ready
hands turned him about and conveyed him in silence and haste to the
sidewalk and averted the ignoble fate of the menaced mallard.
Soapy turned off Broadway. It seemed that his route to the coveted
Island was not to be an epicurean one. Some other way of entering
limbo must be thought of.
 34 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES
At a corner of Sixth Avenue electric lights and cunningly displayed
wares behind plate-glass made a shop window conspicuous. Soapy
took a cobblestone and dashed it through the glass. People came
running round the corner, a policeman in the lead. Soapy stood still,
with his hands in his pockets, and smiled at the sight of brass buttons.
'Where's the man that done that?' inquired the officer excitedly.
'Don't you figure out that I might have had something to do with
it?' said Soapy, not without sarcasm, but friendly, as one greets good
fortune.
The policeman's mind refused to accept Soapy even as a clue. Men
who smash windows do not remain to parley with the law's minions.
They take to their heels. The policeman saw a man halfway down the
block running to catch a car. With drawn club he joined in the pursuit.
Soapy, with disgust in his heart, loafed along, twice unsuccessful.
On the opposite side of the street was a restaurant of no great
pretensions. It catered to large appetites and modest purses. Its
crockery and atmosphere were thick; its soup and napery thin. Into
this place Soapy took his accusive shoes and tell-tale trousers without
challenge. At a table he sat and consumed beefsteak, flapjacks,
doughnuts and pie. And then to the waiter he betrayed the fact that the
minutest coin and himself were strangers.
'Now, get busy and call a cop,' said Soapy. 'And don't keep a
gentleman waiting.'
'No cop for youse,' said the waiter, with a voice like butter cakes
and an eye like the cherry in a Manhattan cocktail. 'Hey, Con!'
Neatly upon his left ear on the callous pavement two waiters
pitched Soapy. He arose, joint by joint, as a carpenter's rule opens, and
beat the dust from his clothes. Arrest seemed but a rosy dream. The
Island seemed very far away. A policeman who stood before a drug
store two doors away laughed and walked down the street.
Five blocks Soapy travelled before his courage permitted him to
woo capture again. This time the opportunity presented what he
fatuously termed to himself a 'cinch.' A young woman of a modest and
pleasing guise was standing before a show window gazing with
sprightly interest at its display of shaving mugs and inkstands, and two
yards from the window a large policeman of severe demeanour leaned
against a water-plug.
It was Soapy's design to assume the role of the despicable and
execrated 'masher.' The refined and elegant appearance of his
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 35
victim and the contiguity of the conscientious cop encouraged him to
believe that he would soon feel the pleasant official clutch upon his
arm that would ensure his winter quarters on the right little, tight little
isle.
Soapy straightened the lady missionary's ready-made tie, dragged
his shrinking cuffs into the open, set his hat at a killing cant and sidled
toward the young woman. He made eyes at her, was taken with
sudden coughs and 'hems,' smiled, smirked and went brazenly through
the impudent and contemptible litany of the 'masher.' With half an eye
Soapy saw that the policeman was watching him fixedly. The young
woman moved away a few steps, and again bestowed her absorbed
attention upon the shaving mugs. Soapy followed, boldly stepping to
her side, raised his hat and said:
'Ah there, Bedelia! Don't you want to come and play in my yard?'
The policeman was still looking. The persecuted young woman
had but to beckon a finger and Soapy would be practically en route for
his insular haven. Already he imagined he could feel the cosy warmth
of the station-house. The young woman faced him and, stretching out
a hand, caught Soapy's coat-sleeve.
'Sure, Mike,' she said joyfully, 'if you'll blow me to a pail of suds.
I'd have spoke to you sooner, but the cop was watching.'
With the young woman playing the clinging ivy to his oak Soapy
walked past the policeman, overcome with gloom. He seemed doomed
to liberty.
At the next corner he shook off his companion and ran. He halted
in the district where by night are found the lightest streets, hearts,
vows and librettos. Women in furs and men in greatcoats moved gaily
in the wintry air. A sudden fear seized Soapy that some dreadful
enchantment had rendered him immune to arrest. The thought brought
a little of panic upon it, and when he came upon another policeman
lounging grandly in front of a transplendent theatre he caught at the
immediate straw of 'disorderly conduct.'
On the sidewalk Soapy began to yell drunken gibberish at the top
of his harsh voice. He danced, howled, raved and otherwise disturbed
the welkin.
The policeman twirled his club, turned his back to Soapy and
remarked to a citizen: '
'Tis one of them Yale lads celebratin' the goose egg they give to
the Hartford College. Noisy; but no harm. We've instructions to lave
them be.'
 36 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

Disconsolate, Soapy ceased his unavailing racket. Would never a

policeman lay hands on him? In his fancy the Island seemed an
unattainable Arcadia. He buttoned his thin coat against the chilling
wind.
In a cigar store he saw a well-dressed man lighting a cigar at a
swinging light. His silk umbrella he had set by the door on entering.
Soapy stepped inside, secured the umbrella and sauntered off with it
slowly. The man at the cigar light followed hastily.
'My umbrella,' he said sternly.
'Oh, is it?' sneered Soapy, adding insult to petit larceny. 'Well, why
don't you call a policeman? I took it. Your umbrella! Why don't you
call a cop? There stands one at the corner.'
The umbrella owner slowed his steps. Soapy did likewise, with a
presentiment that luck would again run against him. The policeman
looked at the two curiously.
'Of course,' said the umbrella man - 'that is - well, you know how
these mistakes occur - I - if it's your umbrella I hope you'll excuse me
- I picked it up this morning in a restaurant - If you recognize it as
yours, why - I hope you'll - ' 'Of course it's mine,' said Soapy
viciously.
The ex-umbrella man retreated. The policeman hurried to assist a
tall blonde in an opera cloak across the street in front of a street car
that was approaching two blocks away.
Soapy walked eastward through a street damaged by improvements.
He hurled the umbrella wrathfully into an excavation. He muttered
against the men who wear helmets and carry clubs. Because he wanted
to fall into their clutches, they seemed to regard him as a king who
could do no wrong.
At length Soapy reached one of the avenues to the east where the
glitter and turmoil was but faint. He set his face down this toward
Madison Square, for the homing instinct survives even when the home
is a park bench.
But on an unusually quiet corner Soapy came to a standstill. Here
was an old church, quaint and rambling and gabled. Through one
violet-stained window a soft light glowed, where, no doubt, the
organist loitered over the keys, making sure of his mastery of the
coming Sabbath anthem. For there drifted out to Soapy's ears sweet
music that caught and held him transfixed against the convolutions of
the iron fence.
The moon was above, lustrous and serene; vehicles and pedestrians
were few; sparrows twittered sleepily in the eaves - for a little while
the scene might have been a country churchyard. And

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 37

the anthem that the organist played cemented Soapy to the iron fence,
for he had known it well in the days when his life contained such
things as mothers and roses and ambitions and friends and immaculate
thoughts and collars.
The conjunction of Soapy's receptive state of mind and the
influences about the old church wrought a sudden and wonderful
change in his soul. He viewed with swift horror the pit into which he
had tumbled, the degraded days, unworthy desires, dead hopes,
wrecked faculties and base motives that made up his existence.
And also in a moment his heart responded thrillingly to this novel
mood. An instantaneous and strong impulse moved him to battle with
his desperate fate. He would pull himself out of the mire; he would
make a man of himself again; he would conquer the evil that had
taken possession of him. There was time; he was comparatively young
yet; he would resurrect his old eager ambitions and pursue them
without faltering. Those solemn but sweet organ notes had set up a
revolution in him. To-morrow he would go into the roaring down-
town district and find work. A fur importer had once offered him a
place as driver. He would find him to-morrow and ask for the position.
He would be somebody in the world. He would -
Soapy felt a hand laid on his arm. He looked quickly around into
the broad face of a policeman.
'What are you doin' here?' asked the officer. '
Nothin',' said Soapy.
'Then come along,' said the policeman.
'Three months on the Island,' said the Magistrate in the Police
Court the next morning.

VIII

Memoirs of a Yellow Dog

I DON'T SUPPOSE it will knock any of you people off your

perch to read a contribution from an animal. Mr. Kipling and a good
many others have demonstrated the fact that animals can express
themselves in remunerative English, and no magazine goes to press
nowadays without an animal story in it, except the old-style monthlies
that are still running pictures of Bryan and the Mont Pelée horror. But
you needn't look for any stuck-up literature in my piece,
38 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES
such as Bearoo, the bear, and Snakoo, the snake, and Tammanoo, the
tiger, talk in the jungle books. A yellow dog that's spent most of his
life in a cheap New York flat, sleeping in a corner on an old sateen
underskirt (the one she spilled port wine on at the Lady
Longshoremen's banquet), mustn't be expected to perform any tricks
with the art of speech.
I was born a yellow pup; date, locality, pedigree and weight
unknown. The first thing I can recollect, an old woman had me in a
basket at Broadway and Twenty-third trying to sell me to a fat lady.
Old Mother Hubbard was boosting me to beat the band as a genuine
Pomeranian-Hambletonian-Red-Irish-Cochin-ChinaStoke-Pogis fox
terrier. The fat lady chased a V around among the samples of gros
grain flannelette in her shopping-bag till she cornered it, and gave up.
From that moment I was a pet - a mamma's own wootsey squidlums.
Say, gentle reader, did you ever have a 200-pound woman breathing a
flavour of Camembert cheese and Peau d'Espagne pick you up and
wallop her nose all over you, remarking all the time in an Emma
Eames tone of voice: 'Oh, oo's um oodlum, doodlum, woodlum,
toodlum, bitsy-witsy skoodlums?'
From a pedigreed yellow pup I grew up to be an anonymous
yellow cur looking like a cross between an Angora cat and a box of
lemons. But my mistress never tumbled. She thought that the two
primeval pups that Noah chased into the ark were but a collateral
branch of my ancestors. It took two policemen to keep her from
entering me at the Madison Square Garden for the Siberian
bloodhound prize.
I'll tell you about that flat. The house was the ordinary thing in
New York, paved with Parian marble in the entrance hall and
cobblestones above the first floor. Our flat was three fl - well, not
flights - climbs up. My mistress rented it unfurnished, and put in the
regular things - 1903 antique upholstered parlour set, oil chromo of
geishas in a Harlem tea-house, rubber plant and husband.
By Sirius! there was a biped I felt sorry for. He was a little man
with sandy hair and whiskers a good deal like mine. Hen-pecked? -
well, toucans and flamingoes and pelicans all had their bills in him.
He wiped the dishes and listened to my mistress tell about the cheap,
ragged things the lady with the squirrel-skin coat on the second floor
hung out on her line to dry. And every evening while she was getting
supper she made him take me out on the end of a string for a walk.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 39

If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone they'd
never marry. Laura Lean Jibbey, peanut brittle, a little almond cream
on the neck muscles, dishes unwashed, half an hour's talk with the
iceman, reading a package of old letters, a couple of pickles and two
bottles of malt extract, one hour peeking through a hole in the window
shade into the flat across the airshaft - that's about all there is to it.
Twenty minutes before time for him to come home from work she
straightens up the house, fixes her rat so it won't show, and gets out a
lot of sewing for a ten-minute bluff.
I led a dog's life in that flat. 'Most all day I lay there in my corner
watching the fat woman kill time. I slept sometimes and had pipe
dreams about being out chasing cats into basements and growling at
old ladies with black mittens, as a dog was intended to do. Then she
would pounce upon me with a lot of that drivelling poodle palaver and
kiss me on the nose - but what could I do? A dog can't chew cloves.
I began to feel sorry for Hubby, dog my cats if I didn't. We looked
so much alike that people noticed it when we went out; so we shook
the streets that Morgan's cab drives down, and took to climbing the
piles of last December's snow on the streets where cheap people live.
One evening when we were thus promenading, and I was trying to
look like a prize St. Bernard, and the old man was trying to look like
he wouldn't have murdered the. first organ-grinder he heard play
Mendelssohn's wedding-march, I looked up at him and said, in my
way:
'What are you looking so sour about, you oakum trimmed lobster?
She don't kiss you. You don't have to sit on her lap and listen to talk
that would make the book of a musical comedy sound like the maxims
of Epictetus. You ought to be thankful you're not a dog. Brace up,
Benedick, and bid the blues begone.'
The matrimonial mishap looked down at me with almost canine
intelligence in his face.
'Why, doggie,' says he, 'good doggie. You almost look like you
could speak. What is it, doggie - Cats?'
Cats! Could speak!
But, of course, he couldn't understand. Humans were denied the
speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon
which dogs and men can get together is in fiction.
In the flat across the hall from us lived a lady with a black-andtan
terrier. Her husband strung it and took it out every evening,
40 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

but he always came home cheerful and whistling. One day I touched
noses with the black-and-tan in the hall, and I struck him for an
elucidation.
'See, here, Wiggle-and-Skip,' I says, 'you know that it ain't the
nature of a real man to play dry-nurse to a dog in public. I never saw
one leashed to a bow-wow yet that didn't look like he'd like to lick
every other man that looked at him. But your boss comes in every day
as perky and set up as an amateur prestidigitator doing the egg trick.
How does he do it? Don't tell me he likes it.'
'Him?' says the black-and-tan. 'Why, he uses Nature's Own
Remedy. He gets spifflicated. At first when we go out he's as shy as
the man on the steamer who would rather play pedro when they make
'em all jackpots. By the time we've been in eight saloons he don't care
whether the thing on the end of his line is a dog or a catfish. I've lost
two inches of my tail trying to sidestep those swinging doors.'
The pointer I got from that terrier - vaudeville please copy - set me
to thinking.
One evening about six o'clock my mistress ordered him to get
busy and do the ozone act for Lovey. I have concealed it until now,
but that is what she called me. The black-and-tan was called
'Tweetness.' I consider that I have the bulge on him as far as you could
chase a rabbit. Still 'Lovey' is something of a nomenclatural tin-can on
the tail of one's self-respect.
At a quiet place on a safe street I tightened the line of my
custodian in front of an attractive, refined saloon. I made a dead-ahead
scramble for the doors, whining like a dog in the press despatches that
lets the family know that little Alice is bogged while gathering lilies in
the brook.
'Why, darn my eyes,' says the old man, with a grin; 'darn my eyes
if the saffron-coloured son of a seltzer lemonade ain't asking me in to
take a drink. Lemme see - how long's it been since I saved shoe
leather by keeping one foot on the footrest? I believe I'll - '
I knew I had him. Hot Scotches he took, sitting at a table. For an
hour he kept the Campbells coming. I sat by his side rapping for the
waiter with my tail, and eating free lunch such as mamma in her flat
never equalled with her homemade truck bought at a delicatessen store
eight minutes before papa comes home.
When the products of Scotland were all exhausted except the rye
bread the old man unwound me from the table leg and played me
outside like a fisherman plays a salmon. Out there he took off my
collar and threw it into the street.

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 41

'Poor doggie,' says he; 'good doggie. She shan't kiss you any more. '
S a darned shame. Good doggie, go away and get run over by a street
car and be happy.'
I refused to leave. I leaped and frisked around the old man's legs
happy as a pug on a rug.
'You old flea-headed woodchuck-chaser,' I said to him - 'you moon-
baying, rabbit-pointing, egg-stealing old beagle, can't you see that I
don't want to leave you? Can't you see that we're both Pups in the
Wood and the missis is the cruel uncle after you with the dish towel
and me with the flea liniment and a pink bow to tie on my tail. Why
not cut that all out and be pards for evermore?'
Maybe you'll say he didn't understand - maybe he didn't. But he
kind of got a grip on the Hot Scotches, and stood still for a minute,
thinking.
'Doggie,' says he finally, 'we don't live more than a dozen lives on
this earth, and very few of us live to be more than 300. If I ever see
that flat any more I'm a flat, and if you do you're flatter; and that's no
flattery. I'm offering 60 to 1 that Westward Ho wins out by the length
of a dachshund.'
There was no string, but I frolicked along with my master to the
Twenty-third Street ferry. And the cats on the route saw reason to give
thanks that prehensile claws had been given them. On the Jersey side
my master said to a stranger who stood eating a currant bun: '
Me and my doggie, we are bound for the Rocky Mountains.'
But what pleased me most was when my old man pulled both of my
ears until I howled, and said:
'You common, monkey-headed, rat-tailed, sulphur-coloured son of
a door-mat, do you know what I'm going to call you?'
I thought of 'Lovey,' and I whined dolefully.
'I'm going to call you "Pete," ' says my master; and if I'd had five
tails I couldn't have done enough wagging to do justice to the
occasion.

IX

The Love-philtre of Ikey Schoenstein

THE BLUE LIGHT DRUG STORE is down-town, between the

Bowery and First Avenue, where the distance between the two streets
is the shortest. The Blue Light does not consider that pharmacy is a
thing

42 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

of bric-a-brac, scent and ice-cream soda. If you ask it for a pain-killer
it will not give you a bonbon.
The Blue Light scorns the labour-saving arts of modern pharmacy.
It macerates its opium and percolates its own laudanum and paregoric.
To this day pills are made behind its tall prescription desk - pills rolled
out on its own pill-tile, divided with a spatula, rolled with the finger
and thumb, dusted with calcined magnesia and delivered in little
round, pasteboard pill-boxes. The store is on a corner about which
coveys of ragged-plumed, hilarious children play and become
candidates for the cough-drops and soothing syrups that wait for them
inside.
Ikey Schoenstein was the night clerk of the Blue Light and the
friend of his customers. Thus it is on the East Side, where the heart of
pharmacy is not glacé. There, as it should be, the druggist is a
counsellor, a confessor, an adviser, an able and willing missionary and
mentor whose learning is respected, whose occult wisdom is venerated
and whose medicine is often poured, untasted, into the gutter.
Therefore Ikey's corniform, bespectacled nose and narrow,
knowledge-bowed figure was well known in the vicinity of the Blue
Light, and his advice and notice were much desired.
Ikey roomed and breakfasted at Mrs. Riddle's, two squares away.
Mrs. Riddle had a daughter named Rosy. The circumlocution has been
in vain - you must have guessed it - Ikey adored Rosy. She tinctured
all his thoughts; she was the compound extract of all that was
chemically pure and officinal - the dispensatory contained nothing
equal to her. But Ikey was timid, and his hopes remained insoluble in
the menstruum of his backwardness and fears. Behind his counter he
was a superior being, calmly conscious of special knowledge and
worth; outside, he was a weak-kneed, purblind, motorman-cursed
rambler, with ill-fitting clothes stained with chemicals and smelling of
socotrine aloes and valerianate of ammonia.
The fly in Ikey's ointment (thrice welcome, pat trope!) was Chunk
McGowan.
Mr. McGowan was also striving to catch the bright smiles tossed
about by Rosy. But he was no out-fielder as Ikey was; he picked them
off the bat. At the same time he was Ikey's friend and customer, and
often dropped in at the Blue Light Drug Store to have a bruise painted
with iodine or get a cut rubber-plastered after a pleasant evening spent
along the Bowery.
One afternoon McGowan drifted in in his silent, easy way, and
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 43
sat, comely, smoothed-faced, hard, indomitable, good-natured, upon a
stool.
'Ikey,' said he, when his friend had fetched his mortar and sat
opposite, grinding gum benzoin to a powder, 'get busy with your ear.
It's drugs for me if you've got the line I need.'
Ikey scanned the countenance of Mr. McGowan for the usual
evidences of conflict, but found none.
'Take your coat off,' he ordered. 'I guess already that you have
been stuck in the ribs with a knife. I have many times told you those
Dagoes would do you up.'
Mr. McGowan smiled. 'Not them,' he said. 'Not any Dagoes. But
you've located the diagnosis all right enough - it's under my coat, near
the ribs. Say! Ikey - Rosy and me are goin' to run away and get
married to-night.'
Ikey's left forefinger was doubled over the edge of the mortar,
holding it steady. He gave it a wild rap with the pestle, but felt it not.
Meanwhile Mr. McGowan's smile faded to a look of perplexed gloom.
'That is,' he continued, 'if she keeps in the notion until the time
comes. We've been layin' pipes for the gateway for two weeks. One
day she says she will; the same evenin' she says nixy. We've agreed on
to-night, and Rosy's stuck to the affirmative this time for two whole
days. But it's five hours yet till the time, and I'm afraid she'll stand me
up when it comes to the scratch.'
'You said you wanted drugs,' remarked Ikey.
Mr. McGowan looked ill at ease and harassed - a condition
opposed to his usual line of demeanour. He made a patent-medicine
almanac into a roll and fitted it with unprofitable carefulness about his
finger.
'I wouldn't have this double handicap make a false start to-night
for a million,' he said. 'I've got a little flat up in Harlem all ready, with
chrysanthemums on the table and a kettle ready to boil. And I've
engaged a pulpit pounder to be ready at his house for us at 9.30. It's
got to come off. And if Rosy don't change her mind again!' - Mr.
McGowan ceased, a prey to his doubts.
'I don't see then yet,' said Ikey shortly, 'what makes it that you talk
of drugs, or what I can be doing about it.'
'Old man Riddle don't like me a little bit,' went on the uneasy
suitor, bent upon marshalling his arguments. 'For a week he hasn't let
Rosy step outside the door with me. If it wasn't for losin' a boarder
they'd have bounced me long ago. I'm makin' $20 a week and she'll
never regret flyin' the coop with Chunk McGowan.'

44 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'You will excuse me, Chunk,' said Ikey. 'I must make a prescription
that is to be called for soon.'
'Say,' said McGowan, looking up suddenly, 'say, Ikey, ain't there a
drug of some kind - some kind of powders that'll make a girl like you
better if you give 'em to her?'
Ikey's lip beneath his nose curled with the scorn of superior
enlightenment; but before he could answer, McGowan continued:
'Tim Lacy told me once that he got some from a croaker uptown
and fed 'em to his girl in soda water. From the very first dose he was
ace-high and everybody else looked like thirty cents to her. They was
married in less than two weeks.'
Strong and simple was Chunk McGowan. A better reader of men
than Ikey was could have seen that his tough frame was strung upon
fine wires. Like a good general who was about to invade the enemy's
territory he was seeking to guard every point against possible failure.
'I thought,' went on Chunk hopefully, 'that if I had one of them
powders to give Rosy when I see her at supper to-night it might brace
her up and keep her from reneging on the proposition to skip. I guess
she don't need a mule team to drag her away, but women are better at
coaching than they are at running bases. If the stuff'll work just for a
couple of hours it'll do the trick.'
'When is this foolishness of running away to be happening?' asked
Ikey.
'Nine o'clock,' said Mr. McGowan. 'Supper's at seven. At eight
Rosy goes to bed with a headache. At nine old Parvenzano lets me
through to his backyard, where there's a board off Riddle's fence, next
door. I go under her window and help her down the fireescape. We've
got to make it early on the preacher's account. It's all dead easy if
Rosy don't balk when the flag drops. Can you fix me one of them
powders, Ikey?'
Ikey Schoenstein rubbed his nose slowly.
'Chunk,' said he, 'it is of drugs of that nature that pharmaceutists
must have much carefulness. To you alone of my acquaintance would
I entrust a powder like that. But for you I shall make it, and you shall
see how it makes Rosy to think of you.'
Ikey went behind the prescription desk. There he crushed to a
powder two soluble tablets, each containing a quarter of a grain of
morphia. To them he added a little sugar of milk to increase the bulk,
and folded the mixture neatly in a white paper. Taken by an adult this
powder would ensure several hours of heavy slumber without danger
to the sleeper. This he handed to Chunk

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 45

McGowan, telling him to administer it in a liquid, if possible, and

received the hearty thanks of the backyard Lochinvar.
The subtlety of Ikey's action becomes apparent upon recital of his
subsequent move. He sent a messenger for Mr. Riddle and disclosed
the plans of McGowan for eloping with Rosy. Mr. Riddle was a stout
man, brick-dusty of complexion and sudden in action.
'Much obliged,' he said briefly to Ikey. 'The lazy Irish loafer! My
own room's just above Rosy's, I'll just go up there myself after supper
and load the shot-gun and wait. If he comes in my backyard he'll go
away in an ambulance instead of a bridal chaise.'
With Rosy held in the clutches of Morpheus for a manyhours'
deep slumber, and the bloodthirsty parent waiting, armed and
forewarned, Ikey felt that his rival was close, indeed, upon
discomfiture.
All night in the Blue Light Store he waited at his duties for chance
news of the tragedy, but none came.
At eight o'clock in the morning the day clerk arrived and Ikey
started hurriedly for Mrs. Riddle's to learn the outcome. And, lo! as he
stepped out of the store who but Chunk McGowan sprang from a
passing street-car and grasped his hand - Chunk McGowan with a
victor's smile and flushed with joy.
'Pulled it off,' said Chunk with Elysium in his grin. 'Rosy hit the
fire-escape on time to a second and we was under the wire at the
Reverend's at 9.3 0 1/4 . She's up at the flat - she cooked eggs this
mornin' in a blue kimono - Lord! how lucky I am! You must pace up
some day, Ikey, and feed with us. I've got a job down near the bridge,
and that's where I'm heading for now.'
'The - the powder?' stammered Ikey.
'Oh, that stuff you gave me!' said Chunk broadening his grin;
'well, it was this way. I sat down at the supper table last night at
Riddle's, and I looked at Rosy, and I says to myself, "Chunk, if you
get the girl get her on the square - don't try any hocus-pocus with a
thoroughbred like her." And I keeps the paper you give me in my
pocket. And then my lamps falls on another party present, who, I says
to myself, is failin' in a proper affection toward his comin' son-in-law,
so I watches my chance and dumps that powder in old man Riddle's
coffee - see?'
74 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

moment immovable. For this odour belonged to Miss Leslie; it was

her own, and hers only.
The odour brought her vividly, almost tangibly before him. The
world of finance dwindled suddenly to a speck. And she was in the
next room - twenty steps away.
'By George, I'll do it now,' said Maxwell, half aloud. 'I'll ask her
now. I wonder I didn't do it long ago.'
He dashed into the inner office with the haste of a short trying to
cover. He charged upon the desk of the stenographer.
She looked up at him with a smile. A soft pink crept over her
cheek, and her eyes were kind and frank. Maxwell leaned one elbow
on her desk. He still clutched fluttering papers with both hands and the
pen was above his ear.
'Miss Leslie,' he began hurriedly, 'I have but a moment to spare. I
want to say something in that moment. Will you be my wife? I haven't
had time to make love to you in the ordinary way, but I really do love
you. Talk quick, please - those fellows are clubbing the stuffing out of
Union Pacific'
'Oh, what are you talking about?' exclaimed the young lady. She
rose to her feet and gazed upon him, round-eyed. 'Don't you
understand?' said Maxwell restively. 'I want you to marry me. I love
you, Miss Leslie. I wanted to tell you, and I snatched a minute when
things had slackened up a bit. They're calling me for the 'phone now.
Tell 'em to wait a minute, Pitcher. Won't you, Miss Leslie?'
The stenographer acted very queerly. At first she seemed
overcome with amazement; then tears flowed from her wondering
eyes; and then she smiled sunnily through them, and one of her arms
slid tenderly about the broker's neck.
'I know now,' she said softly. 'It's this old business that has driven
everything else out of your head for the time. I was frightened at first.
Don't you remember, Harvey? We were married last evening at eight
o'clock in the Little Church Around the Corner.'

XVI

The Furnished Room

RESTLESS, SHIFTING, FUGACIOUS as time itself, is a certain

vast bulk of the population of the redbrick district of the lower West
Side.

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 75

Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room
to furnished room, transients for ever - transients in abode, transients
in heart and mind. They sing 'Home Sweet Home' in ragtime; they
carry their lares et penates in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a
picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree.
Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers,
should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but it
would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the
wake of all these vagrant ghosts.
One evening after dark a young man prowled among these
crumbling red mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth he rested
his lean hand-baggage upon the step and wiped the dust from his hat-
band and forehead. The bell sounded faint and far away in some
remote, hollow depths.
To the door of this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung,
came a housekeeper who made him think of an unwholesome,
surfeited worm that had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought
to fill the vacancy with edible lodgers.
He asked if there was a room to let.
'Come in,' said the housekeeper. Her voice came from her throat;
her throat seemed lined with fur. 'I have the third floor back, vacant
since a week back. Should you wish to look at it?'
The young man followed her up the stairs. A faint light from no
particular source mitigated the shadows of the halls. They trod
noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn.
It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank,
sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to the
staircase and was viscid under the foot like organic matter. At each
turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the wall. Perhaps plants had
once been set within them. If so they had died in that foul and tainted
air. It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but it was not
difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them forth in
the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished pit
below.
'This is the room,' said the housekeeper, from her furry throat. 'It's
a nice room. It ain't often vacant. I had some most elegant people in it
last summer - no trouble at all, and paid in advance to the minute. The
water's at the end of the hall. Sprowls and Mooney-kept it three
months. They done a vaudeville sketch. Miss B'retta Sprowls - you
may have heard of her - Oh, that was just the stage names - right there
over the dresser is where the marriage certificate hung, framed. The
gas is here, and you see

76 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

there is plenty of closet room. It's a room everybody likes. It never
stays idle long.'
'Do you have many theatrical people rooming here?' asked the
young man.
'They comes and goes. A good proportion of my lodgers is
connected with the theatres. Yes, sir, this is the theatrical district.
Actor people never stays long anywhere. I get my share. Yes, they
comes and they goes.'
He engaged the room, paying for a week in advance. He was tired,
he said, and would take possession at once. He counted out the
money. The room had been made ready, she said, even to towels and
water. As the housekeeper moved away he put, for the thousandth
time, the question that he carried at the end of his tongue.
'A young girl - Miss Vashner - Miss Eloise Vashner - do you
remember such a one among your lodgers? She would be singing on
the stage, most likely. A fair girl, of medium height and slender, with
reddish gold hair and a dark mole near her left eyebrow.'
'No, I don't remember the name. Them stage people has names
they change as often as their rooms. They comes and they goes. No, I
don't call that one to mind.'
No. Always no. Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the
inevitable negative. So much time spent by day in questioning
managers, agents, schools and choruses; by night among the audiences
of theatres from all-star casts down to music-halls so low that he
dreaded to find what he most hoped for. He who had loved her best
had tried to find her. He was sure that since her disappearance from
home this great water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a
monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no
foundation, its upper granules of to-day buried to-morrow in ooze and
slime.
The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of
pseudo-hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the
specious smile of a demirep. The sophistical comfort came in reflected
gleams from the decayed furniture, the ragged brocade upholstery of a
couch and two chairs, a footwide cheap pier glass between the two
windows, from one or two gilt picture frames and a brass bedstead in a
corner.
The guest reclined, inert, upon a chair, while the room, confused
in speech as though it were an apartment in Babel, tried to discourse to
him of its divers tenantry.
A polychromatic rug like some brilliant-flowered, rectangular,

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 77

tropical islet lay surrounded by a billowy sea of soiled matting. Upon

the gay-papered wall were those pictures that pursue the homeless one
from house to house - The Huguenot Lovers, The First Quarrel, The
Wedding Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel's chastely
severe outline was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery
drawn rakishly askew like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it
was some desolate flotsam cast aside by the room's marooned when a
lucky sail had borne them to a fresh port - a trifling vase or two,
pictures of actresses, a medicine bottle, some stray cards out of a deck.
One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit,
the little signs left by the furnished room's procession of guests
developed a significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of
the dresser told that lovely woman had marched in the throng. Tiny
finger-prints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel their
way to sun and air. A splattered stain, raying like the shadow of a
bursting bomb, witnessed where a hurled glass or bottle had splintered
with its contents against the wall. Across the pier glass had been
scrawled with a diamond in staggering letters the name 'Marie.' It
seemed that the succession of dwellers in the furnished room had
turned in fury - perhaps tempted beyond forbearance by its garish
coldness - and wreaked upon it their passions. The furniture was
chipped and bruised; the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed
a horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of some
grotesque convulsion. Some more potent upheaval had cloven a great
slice from the marble mantel. Each plank in the floor owned its
particular cant and shriek as from a separate and individual agony. It
seemed incredible that all this malice and injury had been wrought
upon the room by those who had called it for a time their home; and
yet it may have been the cheated home instinct surviving blindly, the
resentful rage at false household gods that had kindled their wrath. A
hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.
The young tenant in the chair allowed these thoughts to file, soft-
shod, through his mind, while there drifted into the room furnished
sounds and furnished scents. He heard in one room a tittering and
incontinent, slack laughter; in others the monologue of a scold, the
rattling of dice, a lullaby, and one crying dully; above him a banjo
tinkled with spirit. Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains
roared intermittently; a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence. And
he breathed the breath of the house - a dank savour rather than a smell
- a cold, musty effluvium as from

78 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

underground vaults mingled with the reeking exhalations of linoleum

and mildewed and rotten woodwork.
Then, suddenly, as he rested there, the room was filled with the
strong, sweet odour of mignonette. It came as upon a single buffet of
wind with such sureness and fragrance and emphasis that it almost
seemed a living visitant. And the man cried aloud, 'What, dear?' as if
he had been called, and sprang up and faced about. The rich odour
clung to him and wrapped him about. He reached out his arms for it,
all his senses for the time confused and commingled. How could one
be peremptorily called by an odour? Surely it must have been a sound.
But, was it not the sound that had touched, that had caressed him?
'She has been in this room,' he cried, and he sprang to wrest from
it a token, for he knew he would recognize the smallest thing that had
belonged to her or that she had touched. This enveloping scent of
mignonette, the odour that she had loved and made her own - whence
came it?
The room had been but carelessly set in order. Scattered upon the
flimsy dresser scarf were half a dozen hairpins - those discreet,
indistinguishable friends of womankind, feminine of gender, infinite
of mood and uncommunicative of tense. These he ignored, conscious
of their triumphant lack of identity. Ransacking the drawers of the
dresser he came upon a discarded, tiny, ragged handkerchief. He
pressed it to his face. It was racy and insolent with heliotrope; he
hurled it to the floor. In another drawer he found odd buttons, a theatre
programme, a pawnbroker's card, two lost marshmallows, a book on
the divination of dreams. In the last was a woman's black satin hair-
bow, which halted him, poised between ice and fire. But the black
satin hair-bow also is femininity's demure, impersonal, common
ornament, and tells no tales.
And then he traversed the room like a hound on the scent,
skimming the walls, considering the corners of the bulging matting on
his hands and knees, rummaging mantel and tables, the curtains and
hangings, the drunken cabinet in the corner, for a visible sign unable
to perceive that she was there beside, around, against, within, above
him, clinging to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly through
the finer senses that even his grosser ones became cognizant of the
call. Once again he answered loudly, 'Yes, dear!' and turned, wild-
eyed, to gaze on vacancy, for he could not yet discern form and colour
and love and outstretched arms in the odour of mignonette. Oh, God!
whence that odour, and since when have odours had a voice to call?
Thus he groped.

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 79

He burrowed in crevices and corners, and found corks and

cigarettes. These he passed in passive contempt. But once he found in
a fold of the matting a half-smoked cigar, and this he ground beneath
his heel with a green and trenchant oath. He sifted the room from end
to end. He found dreary and ignoble small records of many a
peripatetic tenant; but of her whom he sought, and who may have
lodged there, and whose spirit seemed to hover there, he found no
trace.
And then he thought of the housekeeper.
He ran from the haunted room downstairs and to a door that
showed a crack of light. She came out to his knock. He smothered his
excitement as best he could.
'Will you tell me, madam,' he besought her, 'who occupied the
room I have before I came?'
'Yes, sir. I can tell you again. 'Twas Sprowls and Mooney, as I
said. Miss B'retta Sprowls it was in the theatres, but Missis Mooney
she was. My house is well known for respectability. The marriage
certificate hung, framed, on a nail over - '
'What kind of a lady was Miss Sprowls - in looks, I mean?'
'Why, black-haired, sir, short and stout, with a comical face. They
left a week ago Tuesday.'
'And before they occupied it?'
'Why, there was a single gentleman connected with the draying
business. He left owing me a week. Before him was Missis Crowder
and her two children, that stayed four months; and back of them was
old Mr. Doyle, whose sons paid for him. He kept the room six months.
That goes back a year, sir, and further I do not remember.'
He thanked her and crept back to his room. The room was dead.
The essence that had vivified it was gone. The perfume of mignonette
had departed. In its place was the old, stale odour of mouldy house
furniture, of atmosphere in storage.
The ebbing of his hope drained his faith. He sat staring at the
yellow, singing gaslight. Soon he walked to the bed and began to tear
the sheets into strips. With the blade of his knife he drove them tightly
into every crevice around windows and door. When all was snug and
taut he turned out the light, turned the gas full on again and laid
himself gratefully upon the bed.
 •••••

It was Mrs. McCool's night to go with the can for beer. So she
fetched it and sat with Mrs. Purdy in one of those subterranean

80 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

retreats where housekeepers foregather and the worm dieth seldom.

'I rented out my third floor back, this evening,' said Mrs. Purdy,
across a fine circle of foam. 'A young man took it. He went up to bed
two hours ago.
'Now, did ye, Mrs. Purdy, ma'am?' said Mrs. McCool, with intense
admiration. 'You do be a wonder for rentin' rooms of that kind. And
did ye tell him, then?' she concluded in a husky whisper, laden with
mystery.
'Rooms,' said Mrs. Purdy, in her furriest tones, 'are furnished for to
rent. I did not tell him, Mrs. McCool.' '
'Tis right ye are, ma'am; 'tis by renting rooms we kape alive. Ye
have the rale sense for business, ma'am. There be many people will
rayjict the rentin' of a room if they be tould a suicide has been after
dyin' in the bed of it.'
'As you say, we has our living to be making,' remarked Mrs,
Purdy.
'Yis, ma'am; 'tis true. 'Tis just one wake ago this day I helped ye
lay out the third floor back. A pretty slip of a colleen she was to be
killin' herself wid the gas a swate little face she had, Mrs. Purdy,
ma'am.' '
She'd a-been called handsome, as you say,' said Mrs. Purdy,
assenting but critical, 'but for that mole she had a-growin' by her left
eyebrow. Do fill up your glass again, Mrs. McCool.'

XVII

The Brief Debut of Tildy

IF YOU DO NOT KNOW Bogle's Chop House and Family

Restaurant it is your loss. For if you are one of the fortunate ones who
dine expensively you should be interested to know how the other half
consumes provisions. And if you belong to the half to whom waiters'
checks are things of moment, you should know Bogle's, for there you
get your money's worth - in quantity, at least.
Bogle's is situated in that highway of bourgeoisie, that boulevard
of Brown-Jones-and-Robinson, Eighth Avenue. There are two rows of
tables in the room, six in each row. On each table is a castor-stand,
containing cruets of condiments and seasons. From the pepper cruet
you may shake a cloud of something tasteless and melancholy, like
volcanic dust. From the salt cruet you may

178 O HENRY - 10 0 SELECTED STORIES

'A very sad one,' says he, laying the points of his manicured
fingers together. 'An utterly incorrigible girl. I am Special Terrestrial
Officer the Reverend Jones. The case was assigned to me. The girl
murdered her fiancé and committed suicide. She had no defence. My
report to the court relates the facts in detail, all of which are
substantiated by reliable witnesses. The wages of sin is death. Praise
the Lord.'
The court officer opened the door and stepped out.
'Poor girl,' said Special Terrestrial Officer the Reverend Jones,
with a tear in his eye. 'It was one of the saddest cases that I ever met
with. Of course she was - '
'Discharged,' said the court officer. 'Come here, Jonesy. First thing
you know you'll be switched to the pot-pie squad. How would you like
to be on the missionary force in the South Sea Islands - hey? Now,
you quit making these false arrests, or you'll be transferred - see? The
guilty party you've got to look for in this case is a red-haired,
unshaven, untidy man, sitting by the window reading, in his stocking
feet, while his children play in the streets. Get a move on you.'
Now, wasn't that a silly dream?

XXXIII

The Last Leaf

IN A LITTLE DISTRICT west of Washington Square the streets have

run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called 'places.'
These 'places' make strange angles and curves. One street crosses
itself a time or two. An artist once discovered a valuable possibility in
this street. Suppose a collector with a bill for paints, paper and canvas
should, in traversing this route, suddenly meet himself coming back,
without a cent having been paid on account!
So, to quaint old Greenwich Village the art people soon came
prowling, hunting for north windows and eighteenth-century gables
and Dutch attics and low rents. Then they imported some pewter mugs
and a chafing dish or two from Sixth Avenue, and became a 'colony.'
At the top of a squatty, three-story brick Sue and Johnsy had their
studio. 'Johnsy' was familiar for Joanna. One was from Maine, the
other from California. They had met at the table d'hôte of an Eighth
Street 'Delmonico's,' and found their tastes in

O HENRY - 10 0 SELECTED STORIES 179

art, chicory salad and bishop sleeves so congenial that the joint studio
resulted.
That was in May. In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the
doctors called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony, touching one here
and there with his icy finger. Over on the East Side this ravager strode
boldly, smiting his victims by scores, but his feet trod slowly through
the maze of the narrow and moss-grown 'places.'
Mr. Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric old
gentleman. A mite of a little woman with blood thinned by Californian
zephyrs was hardly fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old
duffer. But Johnsy he smote; and she lay, scarcely moving, on her
painted iron bedstead, looking through the small Dutch window-panes
at the blank side of the next brick house.
One morning the busy doctor invited Sue into the hallway with a
shaggy, grey eyebrow.
'She has one chance in - let us say, ten,' he said, as he shook down
the mercury in his clinical thermometer. 'And that chance is for her to
want to live. This way people have of lining-up on the side of the
undertaker makes the entire pharmacopœia look silly. Your little lady
has made up her mind that she's not going to get well. Has she
anything on her mind?'
'She - she wanted to paint the Bay of Naples some day,' said Sue.
'Paint? - bosh! Has she anything on her mind worth thinking
about twice - a man, for instance?'
'A man?' said Sue, with a jews'-harp twang in her voice. 'Is a man
worth - but, no, doctor; there is nothing of the kind.'
'Well, it is the weakness, then,' said the doctor. 'I will do all that
science, so far as it may filter through my efforts, can accomplish. But
whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral
procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of
medicines. If you will get her to ask one question about the new
winter styles in cloak sleeves I will promise you a one-in-five chance
for her, instead of one in ten.'
After the doctor had gone, Sue went into the workroom and cried
a Japanese napkin to a pulp. Then she swaggered into Johnsy's room
with her drawing-board, whistling ragtime.
Johnsy lay, scarcely making a ripple under the bedclothes, with
her face toward the window. Sue stopped whistling, thinking she was
asleep.
She arranged her board and began a pen-and-ink drawing to

180 O HENRY - 10 0 SELECTED STORIES

illustrate a magazine story. Young artists must pave their way to Art
by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to
pave their way to Literature.
As Sue was sketching a pair of elegant horseshow riding trousers
and a monocle on the figure of the hero, an Idaho cowboy, she heard a
low sound, several times repeated. She went quickly to the bedside.
Johnsy's eyes were open wide. She was looking out the window
and counting - counting backward.
'Twelve,' she said, and a little later, 'eleven'; and then 'ten,' and
'nine'; and then 'eight' and 'seven,' almost together.
Sue looked solicitously out the window. What was there to count?
There was only a bare, dreary yard to be seen, and the blank side of
the brick house twenty feet away. An old, old ivy vine, gnarled and
decayed at the roots, climbed half-way up the brick wall. The cold
breath of autumn had stricken its leaves from the vine until its
skeleton branches clung, almost bare, to the crumbling bricks.
'What is it, dear?' asked Sue.
'Six,' said Johnsy, in almost a whisper. 'They're falling faster now.
Three days ago there were almost a hundred. It made my head ache to
count them. But now it's easy. There goes another one. There are only
five left now.'
'Five what, dear? Tell your Sudie.'
'Leaves. On the ivy vine. When the last one falls I must go too.
I've known that for three days. Didn't the doctor tell you?'
'Oh, I never heard of such nonsense,' complained Sue, with
magnificent scorn. 'What have old ivy leaves to do with your getting
well? And you used to love that vine so, you naughty girl. Don't be a
goosey. Why, the doctor told me this morning that your chances for
getting well real soon were - let's see exactly what he said - he said the
chances were ten to one! Why, that's almost as good a chance as we
have in New York when we ride on the street-cars or walk past a new
building. Try to take some broth now, and let Sudie go back to her
drawing, so she can sell the editor man with it, and buy port wine for
her sick child, and porkchops for her greedy self.'
'You needn't get any more wine,' said Johnsy, keeping her eyes
fixed out the window.
'There goes another. No, I don't want any broth. That leaves just
four. I want to see the last one fall before it gets dark. Then I'll go too.'

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 181

'Johnsy, dear,' said Sue, bending over her, 'will you promise me to
keep your eyes closed, and not look out of the window until I am done
working? I must hand those drawings in by to-morrow. I need the
light or I would draw the shade down.' '
Couldn't you draw in the other room?' asked Johnsy coldly.
'I'd rather be here by you,' said Sue. 'Besides, I don't want you to
keep looking at those silly ivy leaves.'
'Tell me as soon as you have finished,' said Johnsy, closing her
eyes, and lying white and still as a fallen statue, 'because I want to see
the last one fall. I'm tired of waiting. I'm tired of thinking. I want to
turn loose my hold on everything, and go sailing down, down, just like
one of those poor, tired leaves.'
'Try to sleep,' said Sue. 'I must call Behrman up to be my model
for the old hermit miner. I'll not be gone a minute. Don't try to move
till I come back.'
Old Behrman was a painter who lived on the ground floor beneath
them. He was past sixty and had a Michael Angelo's Moses beard
curling down from the head of a satyr along the body of an imp.
Behrman was a failure in art. Forty years he had wielded the brush
without getting near enough to touch the hem of his Mistress's robe.
He had been always about to paint a masterpiece, but had never yet
begun it. For several years he had painted nothing except now and
then a daub in the line of commerce or advertising. He earned a little
by serving as a model to those young artists in the colony who could
not pay the price of a professional. He drank gin to excess, and still
talked of his coming masterpiece. For the rest he was a fierce little old
man, who scoffed terribly at softness in anyone, and who regarded
himself as especial mastiff-in-waiting to protect the two young artists
in the studio above.
Sue found Behrman smelling strongly of juniper berries in his
dimly-lighted den below. In one corner was a blank canvas on an easel
that had been waiting there for twenty-five years to receive the first
line of the masterpiece. She told him of Johnsy's fancy, and how she
feared she would, indeed, light and fragile as a leaf herself, float away
when her slight hold upon the world grew weaker.
Old Behrman, with his red eyes plainly streaming, shouted his
contempt and derision for such idiotic imaginings.
 'Vass!' he cried. 'Is dere people in de world mit der foolishness to
die because leafs dey drop off from a confounded vine? I haf not
heard of such a thing. No, I vill not bose as a model for your fool
hermit-dunderhead. Vy do you allow dot silly pusiness to come in der
prain of her? Ach, dot poor little Miss Yohnsy.'

182 O HENRY - 10 0 SELECTED STORIES

'She is very ill arid weak,' said Sue, 'and the fever has left her
mind morbid and full of strange fancies. Very well, Mr. Behrman, if
you do not care to pose for me, you needn't. But I think you are a
horrid old - old flibberti-gibbet.'
'You are just like a woman!' yelled Behrman. 'Who said I vill not
bose? Go on. I come mit you. For half an hour I haf peen trying to say
dot I am ready to bose. Gott! dis is not any blace in which one so goot
as Miss Yohnsy shall lie sick. Some day I vill baint a masterpiece, and
ve shall all go avay. Gott! yes.'
Johnsy was sleeping when they went upstairs. Sue pulled the
shade down to the window-sill and motioned Behrman into the other
room. In there they peered out the window fearfully at the ivy vine.
Then they looked at each other for a moment without speaking. A
persistent, cold rain was falling, mingled with snow. Behrman, in his
old blue shirt, took his seat as the hermit-miner on an upturned kettle
for a rock.
When Sue awoke from an hour's sleep the next morning she found
Johnsy with dull, wide-open eyes staring at the drawn green shade.
'Pull it up! I want to see,' she ordered, in a whisper.
Wearily Sue obeyed.
But, lo! after the beating rain and fierce gusts of wind that had
endured through the livelong night, there yet stood out against the
brick wall one ivy leaf. It was the last on the vine. Still dark green
near its stem, but with its serrated edges tinted with the yellow of
dissolution and decay, it hung bravely from a branch some twenty feet
above the ground.
'It is the last one,' said Johnsy. 'I thought it would surely fall
during the night. I heard the wind. It will fall to-day, and I shall die at
the same time.'
'Dear, dear!' said Sue, leaning her worn face down to the pillow;
'think of me, if you won't think of yourself. What would I do?'
But Johnsy did not answer. The lonesomest thing in all the world
is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey.
The fancy seemed to possess her more strongly as one by one the ties
that bound her to friendship and to earth were loosed.
The day wore away, and even through the twilight they could see
the lone ivy leaf clinging to its stem against the wall. And then, with
the coming of the night the north wind was again loosed, while the
rain still beat against the windows and pattered down from the low
Dutch eaves.

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 183

When it was light enough Johnsy, the merciless, commanded that

the shade be raised.
The ivy leaf was still there.
Johnsy lay for a long time looking at it. And then she called to
Sue, who was stirring her chicken broth over the gas stove.
'I've been a bad girl, Sudie,' said Johnsy. 'Something has made that
last leaf stay there to show me how wicked I was. It is a sin to want to
die. You may bring me a little broth now, and some milk with a little
port in it, and - no; bring me a hand-mirror first; and then pack some
pillows about me, and I will sit up and watch you cook.'
An hour later she said -
'Sudie, some day I hope to paint the Bay of Naples.'
The doctor came in the afternoon, and Sue had an excuse to go
into the hallway as he left.
'Even chances,' said the doctor, talking Sue's thin, shaking hand in
his. 'With good nursing you'll win. And now I must see another case I
have downstairs. Behrman, his name is -- some kind of an artist, I
believe. Pneumonia, too. He is an old, weak man, and the attack is
acute. There is no hope for him; but he goes to the hospital to-day to
be made more comfortable.'
The next day the doctor said to Sue: 'She's out of danger. You've
won. Nutrition and care now - that's all.'
And that afternoon Sue came to the bed where Johnsy lay,
contentedly knitting a very blue and very useless woollen shoulder
scarf, and put one arm around her, pillows and all.
'I have something to tell you, white mouse,' she said. 'Mr.
Behrman died of pneumonia today in hospital. He was ill only two
days. The janitor found him on the morning of the first day in his
room downstairs helpless with pain. His shoes and clothing were wet
through and icy cold. They couldn't imagine where he had been on
such a dreadful night. And then they found a lantern, still lighted, and
a ladder that had been dragged from its place, and some scattered
brushes, and a palette with green and yellow colours mixed on it, and -
look out the window, dear, at the last ivy leaf on the wall. Didn't you
wonder why it never fluttered or moved when the wind blew? Ah,
darling, it's Behrman's masterpiece - he painted it there the night that
the last leaf fell.'
286 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

Presently Thomas moved tentatively in his seat, and thoughtfully

felt an abrasion or two on his knees and elbows.
'Say, Annie,' said he confidentially, 'maybe it's one of the last
dreams of the booze, but I've a kind of a recollection of riding in an
automobile with a swell guy that took me to a house full of eagles and
arc lights. He fed me on biscuits and hot air, and then kicked me down
the front steps. If it was the d t's, why am I so sore?'
'Shut up, you fool,' said Annie.
'If I could find that funny guy's house,' said Thomas, in
conclusion, 'I'd go up there some day and punch his nose for him.'

XLVII

The Poet and the Peasant

THE OTHER DAY a poet friend of mine, who has lived in close
communication with nature all his life, wrote a poem and took it to an
editor.
It was a living pastoral, full of the genuine breath of the fields, the
song of birds, and the pleasant chatter of trickling streams.
When the poet called again to see about it, with hopes of a
beefsteak dinner in his heart, it was handed back to him with the
comment:
'Too artificial.'
Several of us met over spaghetti and Dutchess County chianti, and
swallowed indignation with the slippery forkfuls.
And there we dug a pit for the editor. With us was Conant, a well-
arrived writer of fiction - a man who had trod on asphalt all his life,
and who had never looked upon bucolic scenes except with sensations
of disgust from the windows of express trains.
Conant wrote a poem and called it 'The Doe and the Brook.' It was
a fine specimen of the kind of work you would expect from a poet
who had strayed with Amaryllis only as far as the florist's windows,
and whose sole ornithological discussion had been carried on with a
waiter. Conant signed this poem, and we sent it to the same editor.
But this has very little to do with the story.
Just as the editor was reading the first line of the poem, on the
next morning, a being stumbled off the West Shore ferryboat, and
loped slowly up Forty-second Street.
The invader was a young man with light blue eyes, a hanging

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 287

lip, and hair the exact colour of the little orphan's (afterward
discovered to be the earl's daughter) in one of Mr. Blaney's plays. His
trousers were corduroy, his coat short-sleeved, with buttons in the
middle of his back. One bootleg was outside the corduroys. You
looked expectantly, though in vain, at his straw hat for ear-holes, its
shape inaugurating the suspicion that it had been ravaged from a
former equine possessor. In his hand was a valise - description of it is
an impossible task; a Boston man would not have carried his lunch
and law books to his office in it. And above one ear, in his hair, was a
wisp of hay - the rustic's letter of credit, his badge of innocence, the
last clinging touch of the Garden of Eden lingering to shame the
goldbrick men.
Knowingly, smilingly, the city crowds passed him by. They saw
the raw stranger stand in the gutter and stretch his neck at the tall
buildings. At this they ceased to smile, and even to look at him. It had
been done so often. A few glanced at the antique valise to see what
Coney 'attraction' or brand of chewing-gum he might be thus dinning
into his memory. But for the most part he was ignored. Even the
newsboys looked bored when he scampered like a circus clown out of
the way of cabs and street-cars.
At Eighth Avenue stood 'Bunco Harry,' with his dyed moustache
and shiny, good-natured eyes. Harry was too good an artist not to be
pained at the sight of an actor overdoing his part. He edged up to the
countryman, who had stopped to open his mouth at a jewellery store
window, and shook his head.
'Too thick, pal,' he said critically - 'too thick by a couple of inches.
I don't know what your lay is; but you've got the properties on too
thick. That hay, now - why, they don't even allow that on Proctor's
circuit any more.'
'I don't understand you, mister,' said the green one. 'I'm not lookin'
for any circus. I've just run down from Ulster County to look at the
town, bein' that the hayin's over with. Gosh! but it's a whopper. I
thought Poughkeepsie was some punkins; but this here town is five
times as big.'
'Oh, well,' said 'Bunco Harry,' raising his eyebrows, 'I didn't mean
to butt in. You don't have to tell. I thought you ought to tone down a
little, so I tried to put you wise. Wish you success at your graft,
whatever it is. Come and have a drink, anyhow.'
'I wouldn't mind having a glass of lager beer,' acknowledged the
other.
They went to a café frequented by men with smooth faces and
shifty eyes, and sat at their drinks.

288 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'I'm glad I come across you, mister,' said Haylocks. 'How'd you
like to play a game or two of seven-up? I've got the keerds.'
He fished them out of Noah's valise - a rare, inimitable deck,
greasy with bacon suppers and grimy with the soil of cornfields.
'Bunco Harry' laughed loud and briefly.
'Not for me, sport,' he said firmly. 'I don't go against that make-up
of yours for a cent. But I still say you've overdone it. The Reubs
haven't dressed like that since '79. I doubt if you could work Brooklyn
for a key-winding watch with that lay-out.'
'Oh, you needn't think I ain't got the money,' boasted Haylocks. He
drew forth a tightly rolled mass or bills as large as a teacup, and laid it
on the table.
'Got that for my share of grandmother's farm,' he announced.
'There's $950 in that roll. Thought I'd come into the city and look
around for a likely business to go into.'
'Bunco Harry' took up the roll of money and looked at it with
almost respect in his smiling eyes.
'I've seen worse,' he said critically. 'But you'll never do it in them
clothes. You want to get light tan shoes and a black suit and a straw
hat with a coloured band, and talk a good deal about Pittsburg and
freight differentials, and drink sherry for breakfast in order to work off
phony stuff like that.' '
What's his line?' asked two or three shifty-eyed men of 'Bunco
Harry' after Haylocks had gathered up his impugned money and
departed.
'The queer, I guess,' said Harry. 'Or else he's one of Jerome's men.
Or some guy with a new graft. He's too much hayseed. Maybe that his
- I wonder now - oh no, it couldn't have been real money.'
Haylocks wandered on. Thirst probably assailed him again, for he
dived into a dark groggery on a side-street and bought beer. Several
sinister fellows hung upon one end of the bar. At first sight of him
their eyes brightened; but when his insistent and exaggerated rusticity
became apparent their expressions changed to wary suspicion.
Haylocks swung his valise across the bar.
'Keep that awhile for me, mister,' he said, chewing at the end of a
virulent claybank cigar. 'I'll be back after I knock around a spell. And
keep your eye on it, for there's $950 inside of it, though maybe you
wouldn't think so to look at me.'
Somewhere outside a phonograph struck up a band piece, and
Haylocks was off for it, his coat-tail buttons flopping in the middle of
his back.

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 289

'Divvy? Mike,' said the men hanging upon the bar, winking openly
at one another.
'Honest, now,' said the bartender, kicking the valise to one side.
'You don't think I'd fall to that, do you? Anybody can see he ain't no
jay. One of McAdoo's come-on squad, I guess. He's a shine if he made
himself up. There ain't no parts of the country now where they dress
like that since they run rural free delivery to Providence, Rhode
Island. If he's got nine-fifty in that valise it's a ninety-eight-cent
Waterbury that's stopped at ten minutes to ten.'
When Haylocks had exhausted the resources of Mr. Edison to
amuse he returned for his valise. And then down Broadway he
gallivanted, culling the sights with his eager blue eyes. But still and
evermore Broadway rejected him with curt glances and sardonic
smiles. He was the oldest of the 'gags' that the city must endure. He
was so flagrantly impossible, so ultra-rustic, so exaggerated beyond
the most freakish products of the barnyard, the hayfield and the
vaudeville stage, that he excited only weariness and suspicion. And
the wisp of hay in his hair was so genuine, so fresh and redolent of the
meadows, so clamorously rural, that even a shellgame man would
have put up his peas and folded his table at the sight of it.
Haylocks seated himself upon a flight of stone steps and once
more exhumed his roll of yellow-backs from the valise. The outer one,
a twenty, he shucked off and beckoned to a newsboy.
'Son,' said he, 'run somewhere and get this changed for me. I'm
mighty nigh out of chicken feed; I guess you'll get a nickel if you'll
hurry up.'
A hurt look appeared through the dirt on the newsy's face.
'Aw, watchert'ink! G'wan and get yer funny bill changed yerself.
Dey ain't no farm clothes yer got on. G'wan wit yer stage money.'
On a corner lounged a keen-eyed steerer for a gamblinghouse. He
saw Haylocks, and his expression suddenly grew cold and virtuous.
'Mister,' said the rural one. 'I've heard of places in this here town
where a fellow could have a good game of old sledge or peg a card at
keno. I got $950 in this valise, and I come down from old Ulster to see
the sights. Know where a fellow could get action on about $9 or $10?
I'm goin' to have some sport, and then maybe I'll buy out a business of
some kind.' T
 he steerer looked pained, and investigated a white speck on his left
forefinger nail. '
Cheese it, old man,' he murmured reproachfully. 'The Central

290 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

Office must be bughouse to send you out looking like such a gillie.
You couldn't get within two blocks of a sidewalk crap game in them
Tony Pastor props. The recent Mr. Scotty from Death Valley has got
you beat a crosstown block in the way of Elizabethan scenery and
mechanical accessories. Let it be skiddoo for yours. Nay, I know of no
gilded halls where one may bet a patrol wagon on the ace.'
Rebuffed again by the great city that is so swift to detect
artificialities, Haylocks sat upon the kerb and presented his thoughts
to hold a conference.
'It's my clothes,' said he; 'durned if it ain't. They think I'm a
hayseed and won't have nothin' to do with me. Nobody never made
fun of this hat in Ulster County. I guess if you want folks to notice you
in New York you must dress up like they do.'
So Haylocks went shopping in the bazaars where men spake
through their noses and rubbed their hands and ran the tape line
ecstatically over the bulge in his inside pocket where reposed a red
nubbin of corn with an even number of rows. And messengers bearing
parcels and boxes streamed to his hotel on Broadway within the lights
of Long Acre.
At nine o'clock in the evening one descended to the sidewalk
whom Ulster County would have forsworn. Bright tan were his shoes;
his hat the latest block. His light grey trousers were deeply creased; a
gay blue silk handkerchief flapped from the breast pocket of his
elegant English walking-coat. His collar might have graced a laundry
window; his blond hair was trimmed close; the wisp of hay was gone.
For an instant he stood, resplendent, with the leisurely air of a
boulevardier concocting in his mind the route for his evening
pleasures. And then he turned down the gay, bright street with the
easy and graceful tread of a millionaire.
But in the instant that he had paused the wisest and keenest eyes in
the city had enveloped him in their field of vision. A stout man with
grey eyes picked two of his friends with a lift of his eyebrows from
the row of loungers in front of the hotel.
'The juiciest jay I've seen in six months,' said the man with grey
eyes. 'Come along.'
It was half-past eleven when a man galloped into the West Forty-
seventh Street police-station with the story of his wrongs.
 'Nine hundred and fifty dollars,' he gasped, 'all my share of
grandmother's farm.'
The desk sergeant wrung from him the name Jabez Bulltongue,

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 291

of Locust Valley Farm, Ulster County, and then began to take
descriptions of the strong-arm gentlemen.
When Conant went to see the editor about the fate of his poem, he
was received over the head of the office boy into the inner office that
is decorated with the statuettes by Rodin and J. G. Brown.
'When I read the first line of "The Doe and the Brook," ' said the
editor, 'I knew it to be the work of one whose life has been heart to
heart with nature. The finished art of the line did not blind me to that
fact. To use a somewhat homely comparison, it was as if a wild, free
child of the woods and fields were to don the garb of fashion and walk
down Broadway. Beneath the apparel the man would show.'
'Thanks,' said Conant. 'I suppose the cheque will be round on
Thursday, as usual.'
The morals of this story have somehow gotten mixed. You can
take your choice of 'Stay on the Farm' or 'Don't write Poetry.'

XLVIII

The Thing's the Play

BEING ACQUAINTED WITH a newspaper reporter who had a

couple of free passes, I got to see the performance a few nights ago at
one of the popular vaudeville houses.
One of the numbers was a violin solo by a striking-looking man
not much past forty, but with very grey, thick hair. Not being afflicted
with a taste for music, I let the system of noises drift past my ears
while I regarded the man.
'There was a story about that chap a month or two ago,' said the
reporter. 'They gave me the assignment. It was to run a column and
was to be on the extremely light and joking order. The old man seems
to like the funny touch I give to local happenings. Oh yes, I'm working
on a farce comedy now. Well, I went down to the house and got all the
details; but I certainly fell down on that job. I went back and turned in
a comic write-up of an east side funeral instead. Why? Oh, I couldn't
seem to get hold of it with my funny hooks, somehow. Maybe you
could make a one-act tragedy out of it for a curtain-raiser. I'll give you
the details.'
After the performance my friend, the reporter, recited to me the
facts over the Würzburger.

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 297

racking, petitionary music of a violin. The hag, music, bewitches some
of the noblest. The daws may peck upon one's sleeve without in
injury, but whoever wears his heart upon his tympanum gets it not far
from the neck.
This music and the musician called her, and at her side honour and
the old love held her back.
'Forgive me,' he pleaded.
'Twenty years is a long time to remain away from the one you say
you love,' she declared, with a purgatorial touch.
'How could I tell?' he begged. 'I will conceal nothing from you.
That night when he left I followed him. I was mad with jealousy. On a
dark street I struck him down. He did not rise. I examined him. His
head had struck a stone. I did not intend to kill him. I was mad with
love and jealousy. I hid near by and saw an ambulance take him away.
Although you married him, Helen - '
'Who are you?' cried the woman, with wide-open eyes, snatching
her hand away.
'Don't you remember me, Helen - the one who has always loved
you the best? I am John Delaney. If you can forgive - '
But she was gone, leaping, stumbling, hurrying, flying up the
stairs toward the music and him who had forgotten, but who had
known her for his in each of his two existences, and as she climbed up
she sobbed, cried and sang: 'Frank! Frank! Frank!'
Three mortals thus juggling with years as though they were
billiard balls, and my friend, the reporter, couldn't see anything funny
in it!
XLIX

A Ramble in Aphasia

MY WIFE AND I PARTED on that morning in precisely our usual

manner. She left her second cup of tea to follow me to the front door.
There she plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint (the
universal act of woman to proclaim ownership) and bade me take care
of my cold. I had no cold. Next came her kiss of parting - the level
kiss of domesticity flavoured with Young Hyson. There was no fear of
the extemporaneous, of variety spicing her infinite custom. With the
deft touch of long malpractice, she dabbed awry my well-set scarf-pin;
and then, as I closed the door, I heard her morning slippers pattering
back to her cooling tea.

298 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

When I set out I had no thought or premonition of what was to

occur. The attack came suddenly.
For many weeks I had been toiling, almost night and day, at a
famous railroad law case that I won triumphantly but a few days
previously. In fact, I had been digging away at the law almost without
cessation for many years. Once or twice good Doctor Volney, my
friend and physician, had warned me.
'If you don't slacken up, Bellford,' he said, 'you'll go suddenly to
pieces. Either your nerves or your brain will give way. Tell me, does a
week pass in which you do not read in the papers of a case of aphasia -
of some man lost, wandering nameless, with his past and his identity
blotted out - and all from that little brain-clot made by overwork or
worry?'
'I always thought,' said I, 'that the clot in those instances was really
to be found on the brains of the newspaper reporters.'
Dr. Volney shook his head.
'The disease exists,' he said. 'You need a change or a rest. Court-
room, office and home - there is the only route you travel. For
recreation you - read law books. Better take warning in time.'
'On Thursday nights,' I said defensively, 'my wife and I play
cribbage. On Sundays she reads to me the weekly letter from her
mother. That law books are not a recreation remains yet to be
established.'
That morning as I walked I was thinking of Doctor Volney's
words. I was feeling as well as I usually did - possibly in better spirits
than usual.

I awoke with stiff and cramped muscles from having slept long on
the incommodious seat of a day coach. I leaned my head against the
seat and tried to think. After a long time I said to myself: 'I must have
a name of some sort.' I searched my pockets. Not a card; not a letter;
not a paper or monogram could I find. But I found in my coat pocket
nearly $3,000 in bills of large denomination. 'I must be someone, of
course,' I repeated to myself, and began again to consider.
The car was well crowded with men, among whom I told myself,
there must have been some common interest, for they intermingled
freely, and seemed in the best good-humour and spirits. One of them -
a stout, spectacled gentleman enveloped in a decided odour of
cinnamon and aloes - took the vacant half of my seat with a friendly
nod, and unfolded a newspaper. In the intervals between his periods of
reading, we conversed, as travellers will, on current

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 299

affairs. I found myself able to sustain the conversation on such

subjects with credit, at least to my memory. By and by my companion
said: '
You are one of us, of course. Fine lot of men the West sends in
this time. I'm glad they held the convention in New York; I've never
been East before. My name's R. P. Bolder - Bolder & Son, of Hickory
Grove, Missouri.'
Though unprepared, I rose to the emergency, as men will when
put to it. Now must I hold a christening, and be at once babe, parson
and parent. My senses came to the rescue of my slower brain. The
insistent odour of drugs from my companion supplied one idea; a
glance at his newspaper, where my eye met a conspicuous
advertisement, assisted me further.
'My name,' said I glibly, 'is Edward Pinkhammer. I am a druggist,
and my home is in Cornopolis, Kansas.'
'I knew you were a druggist,' said my fellow-traveller affably. 'I
saw the callous spot on your right forefinger where the handle of the
pestle rubs. Of course, you are a delegate to our National Convention.'
'Are all these men druggists?' I asked wonderingly.
'They are. This car came through from the West. And they're your
old-time druggists, too - none of your patent tablet-and-granule
pharmashootists that use slot machines instead of a prescription desk.
We percolate our own paregoric and roll our own pills, and we ain't
above handling a few garden seeds in the spring, and carrying a
sideline of confectionery and shoes. I tell you, Hampinker, I've got an
idea to spring on this convention - new ideas is what they want. Now,
you know the shelf bottles of tartar emetic and Rochelle salt Ant. et
Pot. Tart. and Sod. et Pot. Tart. - one's poison, you know, and the
other's harmless. It's easy to mistake one label for the other. Where do
druggists mostly keep 'em? Why, as far apart as possible, on different
shelves. That's wrong. I say keep 'em side by side so when you want
one you can always compare it with the other and avoid mistakes. Do
you catch the idea?'
'It seems to me a very good one,' I said.
'All right! When I spring it on the convention you back it up. We'll
make some of these Eastern orange-phosphate-and-massage-cream
professors that think they're the only lozenges in the market look like
hypodermic tablets.'
'If I can be of any aid,' I said, warming, 'the two bottles of - er - '
'Tartrate of antimony and potash, and tartrate of soda and potash.'

300 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'Shall henceforth sit side by side,' I concluded firmly.

'Now, there's another thing,' said Mr. Bolder. 'For an excipient in
manipulating a pill mass which do you prefer - the magnesia
carbonate or the pulverized glycerrhiza radix?'
'The - er - magnesia,' I said. It was easier to say than the other
word.
Mr. Bolder glanced at me distrustfully through his spectacles.
'Give me the glycerrhiza,' said he. 'Magnesia cakes.'
'Here's another one of these fake aphasia cases,' he said, presently,
handing me his newspaper, and laying his finger upon an article. 'I
don't believe in 'em. I put nine out of ten of 'em down as frauds. A
man gets sick of his business and his folks and wants to have a good
time. He skips out somewhere, and when they find him he pretends to
have lost his memory - don't know his own name, and won't even
recognize the strawberry mark on his wife's left shoulder. Aphasia!
Tut! Why can't they stay at home and forget?'
I took the paper and read, after the pungent headlines, the
following:
'DENVER, June 12. - Elwyn C. Bellford, a prominent lawyer, is
mysteriously missing from his home since three days ago, and all
efforts to locate him have been in vain. Mr. Bellford is a well-known
citizen of the highest standing, and has enjoyed a large and lucrative
law practice. He is married and owns a fine home and the most
extensive private library in the State. On the day of his disappearance,
he drew quite a large sum of money from his bank. No one can be
found who saw him after he left the bank. Mr. Bellford was a man of
singularly quiet and domestic tastes, and seemed to find his happiness
in his home and profession. If any clue at all exists to his strange
disappearance, it may be found in the fact that for some months he had
been deeply absorbed in an important law case in connection with the
Q. Y. and Z. Railroad Company. It is feared that overwork may have
affected his mind. Every effort is being made to discover the
whereabouts of the missing man.'

'It seems to me you are not altogether uncynical Mr. Bolder,' I

said, after I had read the despatch. 'This has the sound, to me, of a
genuine case. Why should this man, prosperous, happily married and
respected, choose suddenly to abandon everything? I know that these
lapses of memory do occur, and that men do find themselves adrift
without a name, a history or a home.' 'Oh, gammon and jalap!' said
Mr. Bolder. 'It's larks they're after. There's too much education
nowadays. Men know about aphasia, and they use it for an excuse.
The women are wise, too.

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 301

When it's all over they look you in the eye, as scientific as you please,
and say: "He hypnotized me." '
Thus Mr. Bolder diverted, but did not aid me with his comments
and philosophy.
We arrived in New York about ten at night. I rode in a cab to an
hotel, and I wrote my name 'Edward Pinkhammer' in the register. As I
did so I felt pervade me a splendid, wild, intoxicating buoyancy - a
sense of unlimited freedom, of newly attained possibilities. I was just
born into the world. The old fetters - whatever they had been - were
stricken from my hands and feet. The future lay before me a clear road
such as an infant enters, and I could set out upon it equipped with a
man's learning and experience.
I thought the hotel clerk looked at me five seconds too long. I had
no baggage. 'The Druggists' Convention,' I said. 'My trunk has
somehow failed to arrive.' I drew out a roll of money.
'Ah!' said he, showing an auriferous tooth, 'we have quite a
number of the Western delegates stopping here.' He struck a bell for
the boy.
I endeavoured to give colour to my rôle. '
There is an important movement on foot among us Westerners,' I
said, 'in regard to a recommendation to the convention that the bottles
containing the tartrate of antimony and potash, and the tartrate of
sodium and potash, be kept in a contiguous position on the shelf.'
'Gentleman to three-fourteen,' said the clerk hastily. I was whisked
away to my room.
The next day I bought a trunk and clothing, and began to live the
life of Edward Pinkhammer. I did not tax my brain with endeavours to
solve problems of the past.
It was a piquant and sparkling cup that the great island city held
up to my lips. I drank of it gratefully. The keys of Manhattan belong
to him who is able to bear them. You must be either the city's guest or
its victim.
The following few days were as gold and silver. Edward
Pinkhammer, yet counting back to his birth by hours only, knew the
rare joy of having come upon so diverting a world full-fledged and
unrestrained. I sat entranced on the magic carpets provided in theatres
and roof-gardens, that transported one into strange and delightful
lands full of frolicsome music, pretty girls and grotesque, drolly
extravagant parodies upon humankind. I went here and there at my
own dear will, bound by no limits of space,

302 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

time or comportment. I dined in weird cabarets, at weirder tables
d'hôte to the sound of Hungarian music and the wild shouts of
mercurial artists and sculptors. Or, again, where the night life quivers
in the electric glare like a kinetoscopic picture, and the millinery of
the world, and its jewels, and the ones whom they adorn, and the men
who make all three possible are met for good cheer and the
spectacular effect. And among all these scenes that I have mentioned I
learned one thing that I never knew before. And that is that the key to
liberty is not in the hands of Licence, but Convention holds it. Comity
has a toll-gate at which you must pay, or you may not enter the land of
Freedom. In all the glitter, the seeming disorder, the parade, the
abandon, I saw this law, unobtrusive, yet like iron, prevail. Therefore,
in Manhattan you must obey these unwritten laws, and then you will
be freest of the free. If you decline to be bound by them, you put on
shackles.
Sometimes, as my mood urged me, I would seek the stately, softly
murmuring palm-rooms, redolent with high-born life and delicate
restraint, in which to dine. Again I would go down to the waterways in
steamers packed with vociferous, bedecked, unchecked, love-making
clerks and shop-girls to their crude pleasures on the island shores. And
there was always Broadway - glistening, opulent, wily, varying,
desirable Broadway - growing upon one like an opium habit.
One afternoon as I entered my hotel a stout man with a big nose
and a black moustache blocked my way in the corridor. When I would
have passed around him, he greeted me with offensive familiarity.
'Hallo, Bellford!' he cried loudly. 'What the deuce are you doing in
New York? Didn't know anything could drag you away from that old
book den of yours. Is Mrs. B. along or is this a little business run
alone, eh?'
'You have made a mistake, sir,' I said coldly, releasing my hand
from his grasp. 'My name is Pinkhammer. You will excuse me.'
The man dropped to one side, apparently astonished. As I walked
to the clerk's desk I heard him call to a bell-boy and say something
about telegraph blanks.
'You will give me my bill,' I said to the clerk, 'and have my
baggage brought down in half an hour. I do not care to remain where I
am annoyed by confidence men.'
I moved that afternoon to another hotel, a sedate, old-fashioned
one on lower Fifth Avenue.
There was a restaurant a little way off Broadway where one

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 303

could be served almost alfresco in a tropic array of screening flora.

Quiet and luxury and a perfect service made it an ideal place in which
to take luncheon or refreshment. One afternoon I was there picking
my way to a table among the ferns when I felt my sleeve caught.
'Mr. Bellford!' exclaimed an amazingly sweet voice.
I turned quickly to see a lady seated alone - a lady of about thirty,
with exceedingly handsome eyes, who looked at me as though I had
been her very dear friend.
'You were about to pass me,' she said accusingly. 'Don't tell me
you did not know me. Why should we not shake hands - at least once
in fifteen years?'
I shook hands with her at once. I took a chair opposite her at the
table. I summoned with my eyebrows a hovering waiter. The lady was
philandering with an orange ice. I ordered a crème de menthe. Her
hair was reddish bronze. You could not look at it, because you could
not look away from her eyes. But you were conscious of it as you are
conscious of sunset while you look into the profundities of a wood at
twilight.
'Are you sure you know me?' I asked.
'No,' she said, smiling, 'I was never sure of that.'
'What would you think,' I said, a little anxiously, 'if I were to tell
you that my name is Edward Pinkhammer, from Cornopolis, Kansas.'
'What would I think?' she repeated, with a merry glance. 'Why,
that you had not brought Mrs. Bellford to New York with you, of
course. I do wish you had. I would have liked to see Marian.' Her
voice lowered slightly - 'You haven't changed much, Elwyn.'
I felt her wonderful eyes searching mine and my face more
closely.
'Yes, you have,' she amended, and there was a soft, exultant note
in her latest tones; 'I see it now. You haven't forgotten. You haven't
forgotten for a year or a day or an hour. I told you you never could.'
I poked my straw anxiously in the crème de menthe. 'I'm sure I
beg your pardon,' I said, a little uneasy at her gaze. 'But that is just the
trouble. I have forgotten. I've forgotten everything.'
She flouted my denial. She laughed deliciously at something she
seemed to see in my face.
'I've heard of you at times,' she went on. 'You're quite a big lawyer
out West - Denver, isn't it, or Los Angeles? Marian must

304 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

be very proud of you. You knew, I suppose, that I married six months
after you did. You may have seen it in the papers. The flowers alone
cost two thousand dollars.'
She had mentioned fifteen years. Fifteen years is a long time.
'Would it be too late,' I asked somewhat timorously, 'to offer you
congratulations?'
'Not if you dare do it,' she answered, with such fine intrepidity that
I was silent, and began to crease patterns on the cloth with my thumb-
nail.
'Tell me one thing,' she said, leaning toward me rather eagerly - 'a
thing I have wanted to know for many years - just from a woman's
curiosity, of course - have you ever dared since that night to touch,
smell or look at white roses - at white roses wet with rain and dew?'
I took a sip of crème de menthe.
It would be useless, I suppose,' I said, with a sigh, 'for me to repeat
that I have no recollection at all about these things. My memory is
completely at fault. I need not say how much I regret it.'
The lady rested her arms upon the table, and again her eyes
disdained my words and went travelling by their own route direct to
my soul. She laughed softly, with a strange quality in the sound - it
was a laugh of happiness yes, and of content - and of misery. I tried to
look away from her.
'You lie, Elwyn Bellford,' she breathed blissfully. 'Oh, I know you
lie!'
I gazed dully into the ferns.
'My name is Edward Pinkhammer,' I said. 'I came with the
delegates to the Druggists' National Convention. There is a movement
on foot for arranging a new position for the bottles of tartrate of
antimony and tartrate of potash, in which, very likely, you would take
little interest.'
A shining landau stopped before the entrance. The lady rose. I
took her hand, and bowed.
'I am deeply sorry,' I said to her, 'that I cannot remember. I could
explain, but fear you would not understand. You will not concede
Pinkhammer; and I really cannot at all conceive of the - the roses and
other things.'
 'Good-bye, Mr. Bellford,' she said, with her happy, sorrowful
smile, as she stepped into her carriage.
I attended the theatre that night. When I returned to my hotel, a
quiet man in dark clothes, who seemed interested in rubbing his

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 305

finger-nails with a silk handkerchief, appeared, magically, at my side.

'Mr. Pinkhammer,' he said casually, giving the bulk of his
attention to his forefinger, 'may I request you to step aside with me for
a little conversation? There is a room here.'
'Certainly,' I answered.
He conducted me into a small, private parlour. A lady and a
gentleman were there. The lady, I surmised, would have been
unusually good-looking had her features not been clouded by an
expression of keen worry and fatigue. She was of a style of figure and
possessed colouring and features that were agreeable to my fancy. She
was in a travelling-dress; she fixed upon me an earnest look of
extreme anxiety, and pressed an unsteady hand to her bosom. I think
she would have started forward, but the gentleman arrested her
movement with an authoritative motion of his hand. He then came,
himself, to meet me. He was a man of forty, a little grey about the
temples, and with a strong, thoughtful face.
'Bellford, old man,' he said cordially, 'I'm glad to see you again. Of
course we know everything is all right. I warned you, you know, that
you were overdoing it. Now, you'll go back with us, and be yourself
again in no time.'
I smiled ironically.
'I have been "Bellforded" so often,' I said, 'that it has lost its edge.
Still, in the end, it may grow wearisome. Would you be willing at all
to entertain the hypothesis that my name is Edward Pinkhammer, and
that I never saw you before in my life?'
Before the man could reply a wailing cry came from the woman.
She sprang past his detaining arm. 'Elwyn!' she sobbed, and cast
herself upon me, and clung tight. 'Elwyn,' she cried again, 'don't break
my heart. I am your wife - call my name once - just once! I could see
you dead rather than this way.'
I unwound her arms respectfully, but firmly.
'Madam,' I said severely, 'pardon me if I suggest that you accept a
resemblance too precipitately. It is a pity,' I went on, with an amused
laugh, as the thought occurred to me, 'that this Bellford and I could not
be kept side by side upon the same shelf like tartrates of sodium and
antimony for purposes of identification. In order to understand the
allusion,' I concluded airily, 'it may be necessary for you to keep an
eye on the proceedings of the Druggists' National Convention.'
The lady turned to her companion, and grasped his arm.
'What is it, Doctor Volney? Oh, what is it?' she moaned.

306 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

He led her to the door.

'Go to your room for awhile,' I heard him say. 'I will remain and
talk with him. His mind? No, I think not - only a portion of the brain.
Yes, I am sure he will recover. Go to your room and leave me with
him.'
The lady disappeared. The man in dark clothes also went outside,
still manicuring himself in a thoughtful way. I think he waited in the
hall. '
I would like to talk with you a while, Mr. Pinkhammer, if I may,'
said the gentleman who remained.
'Very well, if you care to,' I replied, 'and will excuse me if I take it
comfortably; I am rather tired.' I stretched myself upon a couch by a
window and lit a cigar. He drew a chair near by.
'Let us speak to the point,' he said soothingly. 'Your name is not
Pinkhammer.'
'I know that as well as you do,' I said coolly. 'But a man must have
a name of some sort. I can assure you that I do not extravagantly
admire the name of Pinkhammer. But when one christens one's self,
suddenly the fine names do not seem to suggest themselves. But
suppose it had been Scheringhausen or Scroggins! I think I did very
well with Pinkhammer.'
'Your name,' said the other man seriously, 'is Elwyn C. Bellford.
You are one of the first lawyers in Denver. You are suffering from an
attack of aphasia, which has caused you to forget your identity. The
cause of it was over-application to your profession, and, perhaps, a life
too bare of natural recreation and pleasures. The lady who has just left
the room is your wife.'
'She is what I would call a fine-looking woman,' I said, after a
judicial pause. 'I particularly admire the shade of brown in her hair.'
'She is a wife to be proud of. Since your disappearance, nearly
two weeks ago, she has scarcely closed her eyes. We learned that you
were in New York through a telegram sent by Isidore Newman, a
travelling man from Denver. He said that he had met you in an hotel
here, and that you did not recognize him.'
'I think I remember the occasion,' I said. 'The fellow called me
"Bellford," if I am not mistaken. But don't you think it about time,
now, for you to introduce yourself?'
'I am Robert Volney - Doctor Volney. I have been your close
friend for twenty years, and your physician for fifteen. I came with
Mrs. Bellford to trace you as soon as we got the telegram. Try, Elwyn,
old man - try to remember!'

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 307

'What's the use to try!' I asked, with a little frown. 'You say you
are a physician. Is aphasia curable? When a man loses his memory,
does it return slowly, or suddenly?'
'Sometimes gradually and imperfectly; sometimes as suddenly as
it went.'
'Will you undertake the treatment of my case, Doctor Volney?' I
asked.
'Old friend,' said he, 'I'll do everything in my power, and will have
done everything that science can do to cure you.'
'Very well,' said I. 'Then you will consider that I am your patient.
Everything is in confidence now - professional confidence.'
'Of course,' said Doctor Volney.
I got up from the couch. Someone had set a vase of white roses on
the centre table - a cluster of white roses freshly sprinkled and
fragrant. I threw them far out of the window, and then I laid myself
upon the couch again.
'It will be best, Bobby,' I said, 'to have this cure happen suddenly.
I'm rather tired of it all, anyway. You may go now and bring Marian
in. But, oh, Doc,' I said, with a sigh, as I kicked him on the shin -
'good old Doc - it was glorious!'
L
A Municipal Report
The cities are full of pride,
Challenging each to each -
This from her mountainside,
That from her burthened beach.

R. KIPLING.
Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville,
Tennessee! There are just three big cities in the United States that are
'story cities' - New York, of course, New Orleans, and, best of the lot,
San Francisco. - FRANK NORRIS.

EAST IS EAST, and West is San Francisco, according to

Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely
inhabitants of a State. They are the Southerners of the West. Now,
Chicagoans are no less loyal to their city; but when you ask them why,
they stammer and speak of lake fish and the new Odd Fellows
Building. But Californians go into detail.

308 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

Of course they have, in the climate, an argument that is good for

half an hour while you are thinking of your coal bills and heavy
underwear. But as soon as they come to mistake your silence for
conviction, madness comes upon them, and they picture the city of the
Golden Gate as the Bagdad of the New World. So far, as a matter of
opinion, no refutation is necessary. But, dear cousins all (from Adam
and Eve descended), it is a rash one who will lay his finger on the map
and say: 'In this town there can be no romance - what could happen
here?' Yes, it is a bold and a rash deed to challenge in one sentence
history, romance, and Rand and McNally.

NASHVILLE. - A city, port of delivery, and the capital of the

State of Tennessee, is on the Cumberland River and on the N.C. & St.
L. and the L. & N. railroads. This city is regarded as the most
important educational centre in the South.

I stepped off the train at 8 p.m. Having searched the thesaurus in

vain for adjectives, I must, as a substitution, hie me to comparison in
the form of a recipe.
Take of London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts; gas leaks 20 parts;
dewdrops, gathered in a brickyard at sunrise, 25 parts; odour of
honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix.
The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a
Nashville drizzle. It is not so fragrant as a moth-ball nor as thick as
pea-soup; but 'tis enough - 'twill serve.
I went to an hotel in a tumbril. It required strong self-suppression
for me to keep from climbing to the top of it and giving an imitation
of Sidney Carton. The vehicle was drawn by beasts of a bygone era
and driven by something dark and emancipated.
I was sleepy and tired, so when I got to the hotel I hurriedly paid it
the fifty cents it demanded (with approximate lagniappe, I assure you).
I knew its habits; and I did not want to hear it prate about its old
'marster' or anything that happened 'befo' de wah.'
The hotel was one of the kind described as 'renovated.' That means
$20,000 worth of new marble pillars, tiling, electric lights and brass
cuspidors in the lobby, and a new L. & N. time table and a lithograph
of Lookout Mountain in each one of the great rooms above. The
management was without reproach, the attention full of exquisite
Southern courtesy, the service as slow as the progress of a snail and as
good-humoured as Rip Van Winkle. The food was worth travelling a
thousand miles for. There is no

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 309

other hotel in the world where you can get such chicken livers en
brochette.
At dinner I asked a negro waiter if there was anything doing in
town. He pondered gravely for a minute, and then replied: 'Well, boss,
I don't really reckon there's anything at all doin' after sundown.'
Sundown had been accomplished; it had been drowned in the
drizzle long before. So that spectacle was denied me. But I went forth
upon the streets in the drizzle to see what might be there.

It is built on undulating grounds; and the streets are lighted by

electricity at a cost of $32,470 per annum.

As I left the hotel there was a race riot. Down upon me charged a
company of freedmen, or Arabs, or Zulus, armed with - no, I saw with
relief that they were not rifles, but whips. And I saw dimly a caravan
of black, clumsy vehicles; and at the reassuring shouts, 'Kyar you
anywhere in the town, boss, fuh fifty cents,' I reasoned that I was
merely a 'fare' instead of a victim.
I walked through long streets, all leading uphill. I wondered how
those streets ever came down again. Perhaps they didn't until they
were 'graded.' On a few of the 'main streets' I saw lights in stores here
and there; saw street-cars go by conveying worthy burghers hither and
yon; saw people pass engaged in the art of conversation, and heard a
burst of semi-lively laughter issuing from a soda-water and ice-cream
parlour. The streets other than 'main' seemed to have enticed upon
their borders houses consecrated to peace and domesticity. In many of
them lights shone behind discreetly drawn window shades; in a few
pianos tinkled orderly and irreproachable music. There was, indeed,
little 'doing.' I wished I had come before sundown. So I returned to my
hotel.

In November, 1864, the Confederate General Hood advanced

against Nashville, where he shut up a National force under General
Thomas. The latter then sallied forth and defeated the confederates in
a terrible conflict.
 All my life I have heard of, admired, and witnessed the fine
markmanship of the South in its peaceful conflicts in the
tobaccochewing regions. But in my hotel a surprise awaited me. There
were twelve bright, new, imposing, capacious brass cuspidors in the
great lobby, tall enough to be called urns and so widemouthed that the
crack pitcher of a lady baseball team should

310 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

have been able to throw a ball into one of them at five paces distant.
But, although a terrible battle had raged and was still raging, the
enemy had not suffered. Bright, new, imposing, capacious, untouched,
they stood. But shades of Jefferson Brick! the tile floor - the beautiful
tile floor! I could not avoid thinking of the battle of Nashville, and
trying to draw, as is my foolish habit, some deductions about
hereditary markmanship.
Here I first saw Major (by misplaced courtesy) Wentworth
Caswell. I knew him for a type the moment my eyes suffered from the
sight of him. A rat has no geographical habitat. My old friend, A.
Tennyson, said, as he so well said almost everything:

'Prophet, curse me the blabbing lip,

And curse me the British vermin, the rat.'

Let us regard the word 'British' as interchangeable ad lib. A rat is a

rat.
This man was hunting about the hotel lobby like a starved dog that
had forgotten where he had buried a bone. He had a face of great
acreage, red, pulpy, and with a kind of sleepy massiveness like that of
Buddha. He possessed one single virtue - he was very smoothly
shaven. The mark of the beast is not indelible upon a man until he
goes about with a stubble. I think that if he had not used his razor that
day I would have repulsed his advances, and the criminal calendar of
the world would have been spared the addition of one murder.
I happened to be standing within five feet of a cuspidor when
Major Caswell opened fire upon it. I had been observant enough to
perceive that the attacking force was using Gatlings instead of squirrel
rifles; so I side-stepped so promptly that the major seized the
opportunity to apologize to a non-combatant. He had the blabbing lip.
In four minutes he had become my friend and had dragged me to the
bar.
I desire to interpolate here that I am a Southerner. But I am not
one by profession or trade. I eschew the string tie, the slouch hat, the
Prince Albert, the number of bales of cotton destroyed by Sherman,
and plug chewing. When the orchestra plays Dixie I do not cheer. I
slide a little lower on the leather-cornered seat and, well, order another
Würzburger and wish that Longstreet had - but what's the use?
Major Caswell banged the bar with his fist, and the first gun at
Fort Sumter re-echoed. When he fired the last one at Appomattox

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 311

I began to hope. But then he began on family trees, and demonstrated

that Adam was only a third cousin of a collateral branch of the
Caswell family. Genealogy disposed of, he took up, to my distaste, his
private family matters. He spoke of his wife, traced her descent back
to Eve, and profanely denied any possible rumour that she may have
had relations in the land of Nod.
By this time I began to suspect that he was trying to obscure by
noise the fact that he had ordered the drinks, on the chance that I
would be bewildered into paying for them. But when they were down
he crashed a silver dollar loudly upon the bar. Then, of course, another
serving was obligatory. And when I had paid for that I took leave of
him brusquely; for I wanted no more of him. But before I had obtained
my release he had prated loudly of an income that his wife received,
and showed a handful of silver money.
When I got my key at the desk the clerk said to me courteously: 'If
that man Caswell has annoyed you, and if you would like to make a
complaint, we will have him ejected. He is a nuisance, a loafer, and
without any known means of support, although he seems to have some
money most the time. But we don't seem to be able to hit upon any
means of throwing him out legally.'
'Why, no,' said I, after some reflection; 'I don't see my way clear to
making a complaint. But I would like to place myself on record as
asserting that I do not care for his company. Your town,' I continued,
'seems to be a quiet one. What manner of entertainment, adventure, or
excitement have you to offer to the stranger within your gates?'
'Well, sir,' said the clerk, 'there will be a show here next Thursday.
It is - I'll look it up and have the announcement sent up to your room
with the ice water. Good night.'
After I went up to my room I looked out of the window. It was
only about ten o'clock, but I looked upon a silent town. The drizzle
continued, spangled with dim lights, as far apart as currants in a cake
sold at the Ladies' Exchange.
'A quiet place,' I said to myself, as my first shoe struck the ceiling
of the occupant of the room beneath mine. 'Nothing of the life here
that gives colour and variety to the cities in the East and West. Just a
good, ordinary, humdrum business town.'
 Nashville occupies a foremost place among the manufacturing
centres of the country. It is the fifth boot and shoe market in the
United States, the largest candy and cracker manufacturing city in the
South, and does an enormous wholesale dry goods, grocery and drug
business.

312 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

I must tell you how I came to be in Nashville, and assure you the
digression brings as much tedium to me as it does to you. I was
travelling elsewhere on my own business, but I had a commission
from a Northern literary magazine to stop over there and establish a
personal connection between the publication and one of its
contributors, Azalea Adair.
Adair (there was no clue to the personality except the handwriting)
had sent in some essays (lost art!) and poems that had made the
editors swear approvingly over their one o'clock luncheon. So they
had commissioned me to round up said Adair and corner by contract
his or her output at two cents a word before some other publisher
offered her ten or twenty.
At nine o'clock the next morning, after my chicken livers en
brochette (try them if you can find that hotel), I strayed out into the
drizzle, which was still on for an unlimited run. At the first corner I
came upon Uncle Cæsar. He was a stalwart negro, older than the
pyramids, with grey wool and a face that reminded me of Brutus, and
a second afterwards of the late King Cetewayo. He wore the most
remarkable coat that I ever had seen or expect to see. It reached to his
ankles and had once been a Confederate grey in colours. But rain and
sun and age had so variegated it that Joseph's coat, beside it, would
have faded to a pale monochrome. I must linger with that coat for it
has to do with the story - the story that is so long in coming, because
you can hardly expect anything to happen in Nashville.
Once it must have been the military coat of an officer. The cape of
it had vanished, but all adown its front it had been frogged and
tasselled magnificently. But now the frogs and tassels were gone. In
their stead had been patiently stitched (I surmised by some surviving
'black mammy') new frogs made of cunningly twisted common
hempen twine. This twine was frayed and dishevelled. It must have
been added to the coat as a substitute for vanished splendours, with
tasteless but painstaking devotion, for it followed faithfully the curves
of the long-missing frogs. And, to complete the comedy and pathos of
the garment, all its buttons were gone save one. The second button
from the top alone remained. The coat was fastened by other twine
strings tied through the buttonholes and other holes rudely pierced in
the opposite side. There was never such a weird garment so
fantastically bedecked and of so many mottled hues. The lone button
was the size of a half-dollar, made of yellow horn and sewed on with
coarse twine.
This negro stood by a carriage so old that Ham himself might

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 313

have started a hack line with it after he left the ark with the two
animals hitched to it. As I approached he threw open the door, drew
out a leather duster, waved it, without using it, and said in deep,
rumbling tones:
'Step right in, suh; ain't a speck of dust in it - jus' back from a
funeral, suh.'
I inferred that on such gala occasions carriages were given an
extra cleaning. I looked up and down the street and perceived that
there was little choice among the vehicles for hire that lined the kerb. I
looked in my memorandum book for the address of Azalea Adair.
'I want to go to 861 Jessamine Street,' I said, and was about to step
into the hack. But for an instant the thick, long, gorilla-like arm of the
old negro barred me. On his massive and saturnine face a look of
sudden suspicion and enmity flashed for a moment. Then, with
quickly returning conviction, he asked blandishingly: 'What are you
gwine there for, boss?'
'What is that to you?' I asked a little sharply.
'Nothin', suh, jus' nothin'. Only it's a lonesome kind of part of town
and few folks ever has business out there. Step right in. The seats is
clean - jes' got back from a funeral, suh.'
A mile and a half it must have been to our journey's end. I could
hear nothing but the fearful rattle of the ancient hack over the uneven
brick paving; I could smell nothing but the drizzle, now further
flavoured with coal smoke and something like a mixture of tar and
oleander blossoms. All I could see through the streaming windows
were two rows of dim houses.

The city has an area of 10 square miles; 181 miles of streets, of

which 137 miles are paved; a system of waterworks that cost
$2,000,000, with 77 miles of mains.

Eight-sixty-one Jessamine Street was a decayed mansion. Thirty

yards back from the street it stood, outmerged in a splendid grove of
trees and untrimmed shrubbery. A row of box bushes overflowed and
almost hid the paling fence from sight; the gate was kept closed by a
rope noose that encircled the gate-post and the first paling of the gate.
But when you got inside you saw that 861 was a shell, a shadow, a
ghost of former grandeur and excellence. But in the story, I have not
yet got inside.
When the hack had ceased from rattling and the weary quadrupeds
came to a rest I handed my jehu his fifty cents with an

314 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

additional quarter, feeling a glow of conscious generosity as I did so.

He refused it.
'It's two dollars, suh,' he said.
'How's that?' I asked. 'I plainly heard you call out at the hotel:
"Fifty cents to any part of the town." '
'It's two dollars, suh,' he repeated obstinately. 'It's a long ways
from the hotel.'
'It is within the city limits and well within them,' I argued. 'Don't
think that you have picked up a greenhorn Yankee. Do you see those
hills over there?' I went on, pointing toward the east (I could not see
them, myself, for the drizzle); 'well, I was born and raised on their
other side. You old fool nigger, can't you tell people from other people
when you see em?'
The grim face of King Cetewayo softened. 'Is you from the South,
suh? I reckon it was them shoes of yourn fooled me. There is
somethin' sharp in the toes for a Southern gen'l'man to wear.'
'Then the charge is fifty cents, I suppose?' said I inexorably.
His former expression, a mingling of cupidity and hostility,
returned, remained ten minutes, and vanished.
'Boss,' he said, 'fifty cents is right; but I needs two dollars, suh; I'm
obleeged to have two dollars. I ain't demandin' it now, suh; after I
knows whar you's from; I'm jus' sayin' that I has to have two dollars
to-night, and business is mighty po'.'
Peace and confidence settled upon his heavy features. He had been
luckier than he had hoped. Instead of having picked up a greenhorn,
ignorant of rates, he had come upon an inheritance.
'You confounded old rascal,' I said, reaching down into my pocket,
'you ought to be turned over to the police.'
For the first time I saw him smile. He knew; he knew; HE KNEW.
I gave him two one-dollar bills. As I handed them over I noticed
that one of them had seen parlous times. Its upper right-hand corner
was missing, and it had been torn through in the middle but joined
again. A strip of blue tissue-paper, pasted over the split, preserved its
negotiability.
Enough of the African bandit for the present: I left him happy,
lifted the rope and opened the creaky gate.
 The house, as I said, was a shell. A paint-brush had not touched it
in twenty years. I could not see why a strong wind should not have
bowled it over like a house of cards until I looked again at the trees
that hugged it close - the trees that saw the battle of Nashville and still
drew their protecting branches around it against storm and enemy and
cold.

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 315

Azalea Adair, fifty years old, white-haired, a descendant of the

cavaliers, as thin and frail as the house she lived in, robed in the
cheapest and cleanest dress I ever saw, with an air as simple as a
queen's, received me.
The reception-room seemed a mile square, because there was
nothing in it except some rows of books, on unpainted, white-pine
bookshelves, a cracked, marble-top table, a rag rug, a hairless
horsehair sofa and two or three chairs. Yes, there was a picture on the
wall, a coloured crayon drawing of a cluster of pansies. I looked
around for the portrait of Andrew Jackson and the pine-cone hanging
basket, but they were not there.
Azalea Adair and I had conversation, a little of which will be
repeated to you. She was a product of the old South, gently nurtured in
the sheltered life. Her learning was not broad, but was deep and of
splendid originality in its somewhat narrow scope. She had been
educated at home, and her knowledge of the world was derived from
inference and by inspiration. Of such is the precious, small group of
essayists made. While she talked to me, I kept brushing my fingers,
trying, unconsciously, to rid them guiltily of the absent dust from the
half-calf backs of Lamb, Chaucer, Hazlitt, Marcus Aurelius,
Montaigne and Hood. She was exquisite, she was a valuable
discovery. Nearly everybody nowadays knows too much - oh, so
much too much - of real life.
I could perceive clearly that Azalea Adair was very poor. A house
and a dress she had, not much else, I fancied. So, divided between my
duty to the magazine and my loyalty to the poets and essayists who
fought Thomas in the valley of the Cumberland, I listened to her
voice, which was like a harpsichord's, and found that I could not speak
of contracts. In the presence of the Nine Muses and the Three Graces
one hesitated to lower the topic to two cents. There would have to be
another colloquy after I had regained my commercialism. But I spoke
of my mission, and three o'clock of the next afternoon was set for the
discussion of the business proposition.
'Your town,' I said, as I began to make ready to depart (which is
the time for smooth generalities), 'seems to be a quiet, sedate place. A
home town, I should say, where few things out of the ordinary ever
happen.'

It carries on an extensive trade in stoves and hollow ware with the

West and South, and its flouring mills have a daily capacity of more
than 2,000 barrels.

316 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

Azalea Adair seemed to reflect.

'I have never thought of it that way,' she said, with a kind of
sincere intensity that seemed to belong to her. 'Isn't it in the still, quiet
places that things do happen? I fancy that when God began to create
the earth on the first Monday morning one could have leaned out one's
windows and heard the drop of mud splashing from His trowel as He
built up the everlasting hills. What did the noisiest project in the world
- I mean the building of the tower of Babel - result in finally? A page
and a half of Esperanto in the North American Review.'
'Of course,' said I platitudinously, 'human nature is the same
everywhere; but there is more colour - er - more drama and movement
and - er - romance in some cities than in others.'
'On the surface,' said Azalea Adair. 'I have travelled many times
around the world in a golden airship wafted on two wings - print and
dreams. I have seen (on one of my imaginary tours) the Sultan of
Turkey bow-string with his own hands one of his wives who had
uncovered her face in public. I have seen a man in Nashville tear up
his theatre tickets because his wife was going out with her face
covered - with rice powder. In San Francisco's Chinatown I saw the
slave girl Sing Yee dipped slowly, inch by inch, in boiling almond oil
to make her swear she would never see her American lover again. She
gave in when the boiling oil had reached three inches above her knee.
At a euchre party in East Nashville the other night I saw Kitty Morgan
cut dead by seven of her schoolmates and lifelong friends because she
had married a house painter. The boiling oil was sizzling as high as
her heart; but I wish you could have seen the fine little smile that she
carried from table to table. Oh yes, it is a humdrum town. Just a few
miles of redbrick houses and mud and stores and lumber yards.'
Someone knocked hollowly at the back of the house. Azalea
Adair breathed a soft apology and went to investigate the sound. She
came back in three minutes with brightened eyes, a faint flush on her
cheeks, and ten years lifted from her shoulders.
'You must have a cup of tea before you go,' she said, 'and a sugar
cake.'
She reached and shook a little iron bell. In shuffled a small negro
girl about twelve, bare-foot, not very tidy, glowering at me with
thumb in mouth and bulging eyes.
Azalea Adair opened a tiny, worn purse and drew out a dollar bill,
a dollar bill with the upper right-hand corner missing, torn in

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 317

two pieces and pasted together again with a strip of blue tissuepaper.
It was one of the bills I had given the piratical negro - there was no
doubt of it.
'Go up to Mr. Baker's store on the corner, Impy,' she said, handing
the girl the dollar bill, 'and get a quarter of a pound of tea - the kind he
always sends me - and ten cents worth of sugar cakes. Now, hurry.
The supply of tea in the house happens to be exhausted,' she explained
to me.
Impy left by the back way. Before the scrape of her hard, bare feet
had died away on the back porch, a wild shriek - I was sure it was hers
- filled the hollow house. Then the deep, gruff tones of an angry man's
voice mingled with the girl's further squeals and unintelligible words.
Azalea Adair rose without surprise or emotion and disappeared.
For two minutes I heard the hoarse rumble of the man's voice; then
something like an oath and a light scuffle, and she returned calmly to
her chair.
'This is a roomy house,' she said, 'and I have a tenant for part of it.
I am sorry to have to rescind my invitation to tea. It was impossible to
get the kind I always use at the store. Perhaps to-morrow Mr. Baker
will be able to supply me.'
I was sure that Impy had not had time to leave the house. I
inquired concerning street-car lines and took my leave. After I was
well on my way I remembered that I had not learned Azalea Adair's
name. But to-morrow would do.
That same day I started in on the course of iniquity that this
uneventful city forced upon me. I was in the town only two days, but
in that time I managed to lie shamelessly by telegraph, and to be an
accomplice - after the fact, if that is the correct legal term - to a
murder.
As I rounded the corner nearest my hotel the Afrite coachman of
the polychromatic, nonpareil coat seized me, swung open the
dungeony door of his peripatetic sarcophagus, flirted his feather duster
and began his ritual: 'Step right in, boss. Carriage is clean - jus' got
back from a funeral. Fifty cents to any - '
And then he knew me and grinned broadly. ' 'Scuse me, boss; you
is de gen'l'man what rid out with me dis mawnin'. Thank you kindly,
suh.'
'I am going out to 861 again to-morrow afternoon at three,' said I,
'and if you will be here, I'll let you drive me. So you know Miss
Adair?' I concluded, thinking of my dollar bill.
'I belonged to her father, Judge Adair, suh,' he replied.

318 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'I judge that she is pretty poor,' I said. 'She hasn't much money to
speak of, has she?'
For an instant I looked again at the fierce countenance of King
Cetewayo, and then he changed back to an extortionate old negro
hack-driver.
'She a'n't gwine to starve, suh,' he said slowly. 'She has reso'ces,
suh; she has reso'ces.'
'I shall pay you fifty cents for the trip,' said I.
'Dat is puffeckly correct, suh,' he answered humbly; 'I jus' had to
have dat two dollars dis mawnin, boss.'
I went to the hotel and lied by electricity. I wired the magazine:
'A. Adair holds out for eight cents a word.'
The answer that came back was: 'Give it to her quick, you duffer.
' Just before dinner 'Major' Wentworth Caswell bore down upon
me with the greetings of a long-lost friend. I have seen few men whom
I have so instantaneously hated, and of whom it was so difficult to be
rid. I was standing at the bar when he invaded me; therefore I could
not wave the white ribbon in his face. I would have paid gladly for the
drinks, hoping thereby to escape another, but he was one of those
despicable, roaring, advertising bibbers who must have brass bands
and fireworks attend upon every cent that they waste in their follies.
With an air of producing millions he drew two one-dollar bills
from a pocket and dashed one of them upon the bar. I looked once
more at the dollar bill with the upper right-hand corner missing, torn
through the middle, and patched with a strip of blue tissue-paper. It
was my dollar bill again. It could have been no other.
I went up to my room. The drizzle and the monotony of a dreary,
eventless Southern town had made me tired and listless. I remember
that just before I went to bed I mentally disposed of the mysterious
dollar bill (which might have formed the clue to a tremendously fine
detective story of San Francisco) by saying to myself sleepily: 'Seems
as if a lot of people here own stock in the Hack-Driver's Trust. Pays
dividends promptly, too. Wonder if - ' Then I fell asleep.
King Cetewayo was at his post the next day, and rattled my bones
over the stones out to 861. He was to wait and rattle me back again
when I was ready.
 Azalea Adair looked paler and cleaner and frailer than she had
looked on the day before. After she had signed the contract at eight
cents per word she grew still paler and began to slip out of her chair.

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 319

Without much trouble I managed to get her up on the antediluvian
horsehair sofa and then I ran out to the sidewalk and yelled to the
coffee-coloured Pirate to bring a doctor. With a wisdom that I had not
suspected in him, he abandoned his team and struck off up the street
afoot, realizing the value of speed. In ten minutes he returned with a
grave, grey-haired and capable man of medicine. In a few words
(worth much less than eight cents each) I explained to him my
presence in the hollow house of mystery. He bowed with stately
understanding, and turned to the old negro.
'Uncle Cæsar,' he said calmly, 'run up to my house and ask Miss
Lucy to give you a cream pitcher full of fresh milk and half a tumbler
of port wine. And hurry back. Don't drive - run. I want you to get back
some time this week.'
It occurred to me that Dr. Merriman also felt a distrust as to the
speeding powers of the landpirate's steeds. After Uncle Cæsar was
gone, lumberingly, but swiftly, up the street, the doctor looked me
over with great politeness and as much careful calculation until he had
decided that I might do.
'It is only a case of insufficient nutrition,' he said. 'In other words,
the result of poverty, pride, and starvation. Mrs. Caswell has many
devoted friends who would be glad to aid her, but she will accept
nothing except from that old negro, Uncle Cæsar, who was once
owned by her family.'
'Mrs. Caswell!' said I, in surprise. And then I looked at the
contract and saw that she had signed it 'Azalea Adair Caswell.'
'I thought she was Miss Adair,' I said. '
Married to a drunken, worthless loafer, sir,' said the doctor. 'It is
said that he robs her even of the small sums that her old servant
contributes toward her support.'
When the milk and wine had been brought, the doctor soon
revived Azalea Adair. She sat up and talked of the beauty of the
autumn leaves that were then in season, and their height of colour. She
referred lightly to her fainting seizure as the outcome of an old
palpitation of the heart. Impy fanned her as she lay on the sofa. The
doctor was due elsewhere, and I followed him to the door. I told him
that it was within my power and intentions to make a reasonable
advance of money to Azalea Adair on future contributions to the
magazine, and he seemed pleased.
'By the way,' he said, 'perhaps you would like to know that you
have had royalty for a coachman. Old Cæsar's grandfather was a king
in Congo. Cæsar himself has royal ways, as you may have observed.'

320 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

As the doctor was moving off I heard Uncle Cæsar's voice inside:
'Did he git bofe of dem two dollars from you, Mis' Zalea?'
'Yes, Cæsar,' I heard Azalea Adair answer weakly. And then I
went in and concluded business negotiations with our contributor. I
assumed the responsibility of advancing fifty dollars, putting it as a
necessary formality in binding our bargain. And then Uncle Cæsar
drove me back to the hotel.
Here ends all the story as far as I can testify as a witness. The rest
must be only bare statements of facts.
At about six o'clock I went out for a stroll. Uncle Cæsar was at his
corner. He threw open the door of his carriage, flourished his duster
and began his depressing formula: 'Step right in, suh. Fifty cents to
anywhere in the city - hack's puffickly clean, suh - jus' got back from a
funeral - '
And then he recognized me. I think his eyesight was getting bad.
His coat had taken on a few more faded shades of colour, the twine
strings were more frayed and ragged, the last remaining button - the
button of yellow horn - was gone. A motley descendant of kings was
Uncle Caesar.
About two hours later I saw an excited crowd besieging the front
of a drug store. In a desert where nothing happens this was manna; so
I edged my way inside. On an extemporized couch of empty boxes
and chairs was stretched the mortal corporeality of Major Wentworth
Caswell. A doctor was testing him for the immortal ingredient. His
decision was that it was conspicuous by its absence.
The erstwhile Major had been found dead on a dark street and
brought by curious and ennuied citizens to the drug store. The late
human being had been engaged in terrific battle - the details showed
that. Loafer and reprobate though he had been, he had been also a
warrior. But he had lost. His hands were yet clenched so tightly that
his fingers would not be opened. The gentle citizens who had known
him stood about and searched their vocabularies to find some good
words, if it were possible, to speak of him. One kind-looking man
said, after much thought: 'When "Cas" was about fo'teen he was one
of the best spellers in school.'
While I stood there the fingers of the right hand of 'the man that
was,' which hung down the side of a white pine box, relaxed, and
dropped something at my feet. I covered it with one foot quietly, and a
little later on I picked it up and pocketed it. I reasoned that in his last
struggle his hand must have seized that object unwittingly and held it
in a death-grip.

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 321

At the hotel that night the main topic of conversation, with the
possible exceptions of politics and prohibition, was the demise of
Major Caswell. I heard one man say to a group of listeners:
'In my opinion, gentlemen, Caswell was murdered by some of
these no-account niggers for his money. He had fifty dollars this
afternoon which he showed to several gentlemen in the hotel. When
he was found the money was not on his person.'
I left the city the next morning at nine, and as the train was
crossing the bridge over the Cumberland River I took out of my
pocket a yellow, horn, overcoat button the size of a fifty-cent piece,
with frayed ends of coarse twine hanging from it, and cast it out of the
window into the slow, muddy waters below.
I wonder what's doing in Buffalo!

LI
Compliments of the Season

THERE ARE NO MORE Christmas stories to write. Fiction is

exhausted; and newspaper items the next best, are manufactured by
clever young Journalists who have married early and have an
engagingly pessimistic view of life. Therefore, for seasonable
diversion, we are reduced to two very questionable sources - facts and
philosophy. We will begin with - whichever you choose to call it.
Children are pestilential little animals with which we have to cope
under a bewildering variety of conditions. Especially when childish
sorrows overwhelm them are we put to our wits' end. We exhaust our
paltry store of consolation; and then beat them, sobbing, to sleep.
Then we grovel in the dust of a million years, and ask God why. Thus
we call out of the rat-trap. As for the children, no one understands
them except old maids, hunchbacks, and shepherd dogs.
Now come the facts in the case of the Rag-Doll, the
Tatterdemalion, and the Twenty-fifth of December.
On the tenth of that month the Child of the Millionaire lost her
rag-doll. There were many servants in the Millionaire's palace on the
Hudson, and these ransacked the house and grounds, but without
finding the lost treasure. The Child was a girl of five, and one of those
perverse little beasts that often wound the sensibilities of wealthy
parents by fixing their affections upon some vulgar,

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 329

'P-pardon, lady,' he said, 'but couldn't leave without exchangin'

comp'ments sheason with lady th' house. ' 'Gainst princ'ples gen'leman
do sho.'
And then he began the ancient salutation that was a tradition in the
House when men wore lace ruffles and powder.
'The blessings of another year - '
Fuzzy's memory failed him. The Lady prompted:
'- Be upon this hearth.'
'- The guest - ' stammered Fuzzy.
'- And upon her who - ' continued the Lady, with a leading smile.
'Oh, cut it out,' said Fuzzy ill-manneredly. 'I can't remember.
Drink hearty.'
Fuzzy had shot his arrow. They drank. The Lady smiled again the
smile of her caste. James enveloped Fuzzy and re-conducted him
toward the front door. The harp music still softly drifted through the
house.
Outside, Black Riley breathed on his cold hands and hugged the
gate. 'I wonder,' said the Lady to herself, musing 'who - but there were
so many who came.
I wonder whether memory is a curse or a blessing to them after
they have fallen so low.'
Fuzzy and his escort were nearly at the door. The Lady called:
'James!'
James stalked back obsequiously, leaving Fuzzy waiting
unsteadily, with his brief spark of the divine fire gone.
Outside, Black Riley stamped his cold feet and got a firmer grip
on his section of gas-pipe.
'You will conduct this gentleman,' said the Lady, 'downstairs.
Then tell Louis to get out the Mercedes and take him to whatever
place he wishes to go.'
LII

Proof of the Pudding

SPRING WINKED a vitreous optic at Editor Westbrook, of the

Minerva Magazine, and deflected him from his course. He had
lunched in his favourite corner of a Broadway hotel, and was returning
to his office when his feet became entangled in the lure of the vernal
coquette. Which is by way of saying that he turned eastward in

330 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

Twenty-sixth Street, safely forded the spring freshet of vehicles in

Fifth Avenue, and meandered along the walks of budding Madison
Square.
The lenient air and the settings of the little park almost formed a
pastoral; the colour motif was green - the presiding shade at the
creation of man and vegetation.
The callow grass between the walks was the colour of verdigris, a
poisonous green, reminiscent of the horde of derelict humans that had
breathed upon the soil during the summer and autumn. The bursting
tree-buds looked strangely familiar to those who had botanized among
the garnishings of the fish course of a forty-cent dinner. The sky
above was of that pale aquamarine tint that hallroom poets rhyme with
'true' and 'Sue' and 'coo.' The one natural and frank colour visible was
the ostensible green of the newly painted benches - a shade between
the colour of a pickled cucumber and that of a last year's fast-back
cravenette raincoat. But, to the city-bred eye of Editor Westbrook, the
landscape appeared a masterpiece.
And now, whether you are of those who rush in, or of the gentle
concourse that fears to tread, you must follow in a brief invasion of
the editor's mind.
Editor Westbrook's spirit was contented and serene. The April
number of the Minerva had sold its entire edition before the tenth day
of the month - a newsdealer in Keokuk had written that he could have
sold fifty copies more if he had had 'em. The owners of the magazine
had raised his (the editor's) salary; he had just installed in his home a
jewel of a recently imported cook who was afraid of policemen; and
the morning papers had published in full a speech he had made at a
publishers' banquet. Also there were echoing in his mind the jubilant
notes of a splendid song that his charming young wife had sung to him
before he left his uptown apartment that morning. She was taking
enthusiastic interest in her music of late, practising early and
diligently. When he had complimented her on the improvement in her
voice she had fairly hugged him for joy at his praise. He felt, too, the
benign, tonic medicament of the trained nurse, Spring, tripping softly
adown the wards of the convalescent city.
While Editor Westbrook was sauntering between rows of park
benches (already filling with vagrants and the guardians of lawless
childhood) he felt his sleeve grasped and held. Suspecting that he was
about to be panhandled, he turned a cold and unprofitable face, and
saw that his captor was - Dawe - Shackleford Dawe,

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 331

dingy, almost ragged, the genteel scarcely visible in him through the
deeper lines of the shabby.
While the editor is pulling himself out of his surprise, a flashlight
biography of Dawe is offered.
He was a fiction writer, and one of Westbrook's old acquaintances.
At one time they might have called each other old friends. Dawe had
some money in those days, and lived in a decent apartment-house near
Westbrook's. The two families often went to theatres and dinners
together. Mrs. Dawe and Mrs. Westbrook became 'dearest' friends.
Then one day a little tentacle of the octopus, just to amuse itself,
ingurgitated Dawe's capital, and he moved to the Gramercy Park
neighbourhood, where one, for a few groats per week, may sit upon
one's trunk under eightbranched chandeliers and opposite Carrara
marble mantels and watch the mice play upon the floor. Dawe thought
to live by writing fiction. Now and then he sold a story. He submitted
many to Westbrook. The Minerva printed one or two of them; the rest
were returned. Westbrook sent a careful and conscientious personal
letter with each rejected manuscript, pointing out in detail his reasons
for considering it unavailable. Editor Westbrook had his own clear
conception of what constituted good fiction. So had Dawe. Mrs. Dawe
was mainly concerned about the constituents of the scanty dishes of
food that she managed to scrape together. One day Dawe had been
spouting to her about the excellences of certain French writers. At
dinner they sat down to a dish that a hungry schoolboy could have
encompassed at a gulp. Dawe commented.
'It's Maupassant hash,' said Mrs. Dawe. 'It may not be art, but I do
wish you would do a five course Marion Crawford serial with an Ella
Wheeler Wilcox sonnet for dessert. I'm hungry.'
As far as this from success was Shackleford Dawe when he
plucked Editor Westbrook's sleeve in Madison Square. That was the
first time the editor had seen Dawe in several months.
'Why, Shack, is this you?' said Westbrook somewhat awkwardly,
for the form of this phrase seemed to touch upon the other's changed
appearance.
'Sit down for a minute,' said Dawe, tugging at his sleeve. 'This is
my office. I can't come to yours, looking as I do. Oh, sit down - you
won't be disgraced. Those half-plucked birds on the other benches will
take you for a swell porch-climber. They won't know you are only an
editor.'
'Smoke, Shack?' said Editor Westbrook, sinking cautiously

332 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

upon the virulent green bench. He always yielded gracefully when he

did yield.
Dawe snapped at the cigar as a kingfisher darts at a sunperch, or a
girl pecks at a chocolate cream.
'I have just - ' began the editor.
'Oh, I know; don't finish,' said Dawe. 'Give me a match. You have
just ten minutes to spare. How did you manage to get past my office-
boy and invade my sanctum? There he goes now, throwing his club at
a dog that couldn't read the "Keep off the Grass" signs.'
'How goes the writing?' asked the editor.
'Look at me,' said Dawe, 'for your answer. Now don't put on that
embarrassed, friendly-but-honest look and ask me why I don't get a
job as a wine agent or a cab-driver. I'm in the fight to a finish. I know
I can write good fiction and I'll force you fellows to admit it yet. I'll
make you change the spelling of "regrets" to "c-h-e-q-u-e" before I'm
done with you.'
Editor Westbrook gazed through his nose-glasses with a sweetly
sorrowful, omniscient, sympathetic, sceptical expression - the
copyrighted expression of the editor beleaguered by the unavailable
contributor.
'Have you read the last story I sent you - "The Alarum of the
Soul"?' asked Dawe.
'Carefully. I hesitated over that story, Shack, really I did. It had
some good points. I was writing you a letter to send with it when it
goes back to you. I regret - '
'Never mind the regrets,' said Dawe grimly. 'There's neither salve
nor sting in 'em any more. What I want to know is why. Come, now;
out with the good points first.'
'The story,' said Westbrook deliberately, after a suppressed sigh,
'is written around an almost original plot. Characterization - the best
you have done. Construction - almost as good, except for a few weak
joints which might be strengthened by a few changes and touches. It
was a good story, except - '
'I can write English, can't I?' interrupted Dawe.
'I have always told you,' said the editor, 'that you had a style.'
'Then the trouble is the - '
 'Same old thing,' said Editor Westbrook. 'You work up to your
climax like an artist. And then you turn yourself into a photographer. I
don't know what form of obstinate madness possesses you, Shack, but
that is what you do with everything that you write. No, I will retract
the comparison with the photographer. Now

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 333

and then photography, in spite of its impossible perspective, manages
to record a fleeting glimpse of truth. But you spoil every denouement
by those flat, drab, obliterating strokes of your brush that I have so
often complained of. If you would rise to the literary pinnacle of your
dramatic scenes, and paint them in the high colours that art requires,
the postman would leave fewer bulky, self-addressed envelopes at
your door.'
'Oh, fiddles and footlights!' cried Dawe derisively. 'You've got that
old sawmill drama kink in your brain yet. When the man with the
black moustache kidnaps golden-haired Bessie you are bound to have
the mother kneel and raise her hands in the spotlight and say: "May
high heaven witness that I will rest neither night nor day till the
heartless villain that has stolen me child feels the weight of a mother's
vengeance!" '
Editor Westbrook conceded a smile of impervious complacency.
'I think,' said he, 'that in real life the woman would express herself
in those words or in very similar ones.'
'Not in a six hundred nights' run anywhere but on the stage,' said
Dawe hotly. 'I'll tell you what she'd say in real life. She'd say: "What!
Bessie led away by a strange man? Good Lord! It's one trouble after
another! Get my other hat, I must hurry around to the police-station.
Why wasn't somebody looking after her, I'd like to know? For God's
sake, get out of my way or I'll never get ready. Not that hat - the
brown one with the velvet bows. Bessie must have been crazy; she's
usually shy of strangers. Is that too much powder? Lordy! How I'm
upset!"
'That's the way she'd talk,' continued Dawe. 'People in real life
don't fly into heroics and blank verse at emotional crises. They simply
can't do it. If they talk at all on such occasions they draw from the
same vocabulary that they use every day, and muddle up their words
and ideas a little more, that's all.'
'Shack,' said Editor Westbrook impressively, 'did you ever pick up
the mangled and lifeless form of a child from under the fender of a
street-car, and carry it in your arms and lay it down before the
distracted mother? Did you ever do that and listen to the words of
grief and despair as they flowed spontaneously from her lips?'
'I never did,' said Dawe. 'Did you?'
 'Well, no,' said Editor Westbrook, with a slight frown. 'But I can
well imagine what she would say.'
'So can I,' said Dawe.
And now the fitting time had come for Editor Westbrook to play
the oracle and silence his opinionated contributor. It was not for an

334 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

unarrived fictionist to dictate words to be uttered by the heroes and

heroines of the Minerva Magazine, contrary to the theories of the
editor thereof.
'My dear Shack,' said he, 'if I know anything of life I know that
every sudden, deep and tragic emotion in the human heart calls forth
an apposite, concordant, conformable, and proportionate expression of
feeling? How much of this inevitable accord between expression and
feeling should be attributed to nature, and how much to the influence
of art, it would be difficult to say. The sublimely terrible roar of the
lioness that has been deprived of her cubs is dramatically as far above
her customary whine and purr as the kingly and transcendent
utterances of Lear are above the level of his senile vapourings. But it
is also true that all men and women have what may be called a
subconscious dramatic sense that is awakened by a sufficiently deep
and powerful emotion - a sense unconsciously acquired from literature
and the stage that prompts them to express those emotions in language
befitting their importance and histrionic value.' '
And in the name of seven sacred saddle-blankets of Sagittarius,
where did the stage and literature get the stunt?' asked Dawe.
'From life,' answered the editor triumphantly.
The story-writer rose from the bench and gesticulated eloquently
but dumbly. He was beggared for words with which to formulate
adequately his dissent.
On a bench near by a frowsy loafer opened his red eyes and
perceived that his moral support was due to a down-trodden brother.
'Punch him one, Jack,' he called hoarsely to Dawe. 'Wat's he come
makin' a noise like a penny arcade for amongst gen'lemen that comes
in the Square to set and think?'
Editor Westbrook looked at his watch with an affected show of
leisure.
'Tell me,' asked Dawe, with truculent anxiety, 'what especial faults
in "The Alarum of the Soul" caused you to throw it down.' '
When Gabriel Murray,' said Westbrook, 'goes to his telephone and
is told that his fiancée has been shot by a burglar, he says - I do not
recall the exact words, but - '
'I do,' said Dawe. 'He says: "Damn Central; she always cuts me
off." (And then to his friend): "Say, Tommy, does a thirty-two bullet
make a big hole? It's kind of hard luck, ain't it? Could you get me a
drink from the sideboard, Tommy? No; straight; nothing on the side." '

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 335

'And again,' continued the editor, without pausing for argument,

'when Berenice opens the letter from her husband informing her that
he has fled with the manicure girl, her words are - let me see - '
'She says,' interposed the author: ' "Well, what do you think of
that!" '
'Absurdly inappropriate words,' said Westbrook, 'presenting an
anti-climax - plunging the story into hopeless bathos. Worse yet; they
mirror life falsely. No human being ever uttered banal colloquialisms
when confronted by sudden tragedy.'
'Wrong,' said Dawe, closing his unshaven jaws doggedly. 'I say no
man or woman ever spouts highfalutin talk when they go up against a
real climax. They talk naturally, and a little worse.'
The editor rose from the bench with his air of indulgence and
inside information.
'Say, Westbrook,' said Dawe, pinning him by the lapel, 'would you
have accepted "The Alarum of the Soul" if you had believed that the
actions and words of the characters were true to life in the parts of the
story that we discussed?'
'It is very likely that I would, if I believed that way,' said the
editor. 'But I have explained to you that I do not.'
'If I could prove to you that I am right?'
'I'm sorry, Shack, but I'm afraid I haven't time to argue any further
just now.'
'I don't want to argue,' said Dawe. 'I want to demonstrate to you
from life itself that my view is the correct one.'
'How could you do that?' asked Westbrook in a surprised tone.
'Listen,' said the writer seriously. 'I have thought of a way. It is
important to me that my theory of true-to-life fiction be recognized as
correct by the magazines. I've fought for it for three years, and I'm
down to my last dollar, with two months' rent due.'
'I have applied the opposite of your theory,' said the editor, 'in
selecting the fiction for the Minerva Magazine. The circulation has
gone up from ninety thousand to - '
'Four hundred thousand,' said Dawe. 'Whereas it should have been
boosted to a million.'
'You said something to me just now about demonstrating your pet
theory.'
'I will. If you'll give me about half an hour of your time I'll prove
to you that I am right. I'll prove it by Louise.'
'Your wife!' exclaimed Westbrook. 'How?'
'Well, not exactly by her, but with her,' said Dawe. 'Now, you

336 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

know how devoted and loving Louise has always been. She thinks I'm
the only genuine preparation on the market that bears the old doctor's
signature. She's been fonder and more faithful than ever, since I've
been cast for the neglected genius part.'
'Indeed, she is a charming and admirable life companion,' agreed
the editor. 'I remember what inseparable friends she and Mrs.
Westbrook once were. We are both lucky chaps, Shack, to have such
wives. You must bring Mrs. Dawe up some evening soon, and we'll
have one of those informal chafing-dish suppers that we used to enjoy
so much.'
'Later,' said Dawe. 'When I get another shirt. And now I'll tell you
my scheme. When I was about to leave home after breakfast - if you
can call tea and oatmeal breakfast - Louise told me she was going to
visit her aunt in Eighty-ninth Street. She said she would return home
at three o'clock. She is always on time to a minute. It is now - '
Dawe glanced toward the editor's watch pocket.
'Twenty-seven minutes to three,' said Westbrook, scanning his
timepiece.
'We have just enough time,' said Dawe. 'We will go to my flat at
once. I will write a note, address it to her and leave it on the table
where she will see it as she enters the door. You and I will be in the
dining-room concealed by the portieres. In that note I'll say that I have
fled from her for ever with an affinity who understands the needs of
my artistic soul as she never did. When she reads it we will observe
her actions and hear her words. Then we will know which theory is
the correct one - yours or mine.'
'Oh, never!' exclaimed the editor, shaking his head. 'That would be
inexcusably cruel. I could not consent to have Mrs. Dawe's feelings
played upon in such a manner.'
'Brace up,' said the writer. 'I guess I think as much of her as you
do. It's for her benefit as well as mine. I've got to get a market for my
stories in some way. It won't hurt Louise. She's healthy and sound.
Her heart goes as strong as a ninety-eight-cent watch. It'll last for only
a minute, and then I'll step out and explain to her. You really owe it to
me to give me the chance, Westbrook.'
Editor Westbrook at length yielded, though but half willingly. And
in the half of him that consented lurked the vivisectionist that is in all
of us.
Let him who has not used the scalpel rise and stand in his place.
Pity 'tis that there are not enough rabbits and guinea-pigs to go around.

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 337

The two experimenters in Art left the Square and hurried eastward
and then to the south until they arrived in the Gramercy
neighbourhood. Within its high iron railings the little park had put on
its smart coat of vernal green, and was admiring itself in its fountain
minor. Outside the railings the hollow square of crumbling houses,
shells of a bygone gentry, leaned as if in ghostly gossip over the
forgotten doings of the vanished quality. Sic transit gloria urbis.
A block or two north of the Park, Dawe steered the editor again
eastward, then, after covering a short distance, into a lofty but narrow
flathouse burdened with a floridly over-decorated façade. To the fifth
story they toiled, and Dawe, panting, pushed his latch-key into the
door of one of the front flats.
When the door opened Editor Westbrook saw, with feelings of
pity, how meanly and meagrely the rooms were furnished.
'Get a chair, if you can find one,' said Dawe, 'while I hunt up pen
and ink. Hallo, what's this? Here's a note from Louise. She must have
left it there when she went out this morning.'
He picked up an envelope that lay on the centre-table and tore it
open. He began to read the letter that he drew out of it; and once
having begun it aloud he so read it through to the end. These are the
words that Editor Westbrook heard:

DEAR SHACKLEFORD, -
'By the time you get this I will be about a hundred miles away and
still a-going. I've got a place in the chorus of the Occidental Opera
Co., and we start on the road to-day at twelve o'clock. I didn't want to
starve to death, and so I decided to make my own living. I'm not
coming back. Mrs. Westbrook is going with me. She said she was
tired of living with a combination phonograph, iceberg and dictionary,
and she's not coming back, either. We've been practising the songs and
dances for two months on the quiet. I hope you will be successful, and
get along all right. Good-bye.
LOUISE.'

Dawe dropped the letter, covered his face with his trembling
hands, and cried out in a deep vibrating voice:
 'My God, why hast Thou given me this cup to drink? Since she is
false, then let Thy Heaven's fairest gifts, faith and love, become the
jesting bywords of traitors and friends!'
Editor Westbrook's glasses fell to the floor. The fingers of one
hand fumbled with a button on his coat as he blurted between his pale
lips:

338 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'Say, Shack, ain't that a hell of a note? Wouldn't that knock you off
your perch, Shack? Ain't it hell, now, Shack - ain't it?'

LIII

Past One at Rooney's

ONLY ON THE LOWER East Side of New York do the Houses of

Capulet and Montague survive. There they do not fight by the book of
arithmetic. If you but bite your thumb at an upholder of your opposing
house you have work cut out for your steel. On Broadway you may
drag your man along a dozen blocks by his nose, and he will only
bawl for the watch; but in the domain of the East Side Tybalts and
Mercutios you must observe the niceties of deportment to the wink of
an eyelash and to an inch of elbowroom at the bar when its patrons
include foes of your house and kin.
So, when Eddie McManus, known to the Capulets as Cork
McManus, drifted into Dutch Mike's for a stein of beer, and came
upon a bunch of Montagues making merry with the suds, he began to
observe the strictest parliamentary rules. Courtesy forbade his leaving
the saloon with his thirst unslaked; caution steered him to a place at
the bar where the mirror supplied the cognizance of the enemy's
movements that his indifferent gaze seemed to disdain; experience
whispered to him that the finger of trouble would be busy among the
chattering steins at Dutch Mike's that night. Close by his side drew
Brick Cleary, his Mercutio, companion of his perambulations. Thus
they stood, four of the Mulberry Hill Gang and two of the Dry Dock
Gang minding their P's and Q's so solicitously that Dutch Mike kept
one eye on his customers and the other on an open space beneath his
bar in which it was his custom to seek safety whenever the ominous
politeness of the rival associations congealed into the shapes of bullets
and cold steel.
But we have not to do with the wars of the Mulberry Hills and the
Dry Docks. We must to Rooney's, where, on the most blighted dead
branch of the tree of life, a little pale orchid shall bloom.
Overstrained etiquette at last gave way. It is not known who first
overstepped the bounds of punctilio; but the consequences were
immediate. Buck Malone, of the Mulberry Hills, with a Dewey-like
swiftness, got an eight-inch gun swung round from his