O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

Short stories from 100 Selected Stories, by O Henry

 The Gift of the Magi

 A Cosmopolite in a Cafe
 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

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.
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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 cer-tainly 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. Delia 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 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
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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 '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. 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,
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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.
For their 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!'
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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.
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,
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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
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.
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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
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.'
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'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
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.
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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 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.
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'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
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
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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?'
'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 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.
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'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.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
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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 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:
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'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 Ido 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. Andespecially 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.
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•••••
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.'
'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
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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 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.
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'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 ithelped me) to weld the
incidents together.
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
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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, 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! guess I can sell
papers or lay cobblestones, and bring in a dollar or two.'
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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

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.
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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 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?
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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 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
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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.' 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, 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.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'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
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,
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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.'
'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.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'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?' 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.
'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?'
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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.
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.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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.
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.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'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
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:
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

' '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.'
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. Andthe 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
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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, 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
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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.
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:
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'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,
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

'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 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
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 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
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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.'
'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
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 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?'

XVI
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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.
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 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.'
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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, 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
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 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
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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.
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 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.
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'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.'

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 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.
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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 pharmacopia 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
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
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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.'
'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.'
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'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.
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
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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.'

XLVII
The Poet and the Peasant
T HE 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 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
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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.
'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.'
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'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.
'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.
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'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.'
The steerer looked pained, and investigated a white speck on his left forefinger nail.
'Cheese it, old man,' he murmured reproachfully. 'The Central 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,
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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.'

XL1X
A Ramble in Aphasia
M Y 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.
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.'
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'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
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
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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.'
'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. Rairoad 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.'
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'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. 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, 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
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 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.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'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
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.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'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 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,
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'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.
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?'
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'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!'
'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 Of course they have, in the climate, an argument that is good for half an hour
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 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.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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
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-
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 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.
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.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 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
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 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
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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. 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. 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
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 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
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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.
'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)
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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. 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
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

you may have observed.' 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.
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!
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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
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, dingy, almost ragged, the genteel
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 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.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'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 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.'
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'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 anunarrived 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
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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." '
'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.'
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'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
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
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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.
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: 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?'