Short stories from 100 Selected Stories, by O Henry

ï‚® The Gift of the Magi

 A Cosmopolite in a Café

ï‚® Between Rounds

ï‚® The Skylight Room

ï‚® A Service of Love

ï‚® The Coming-Out of Maggie

ï‚® The Cop and the Anthem

ï‚® Memoirs of a Yellow Dog

ï‚® The Love-philtre of Ikey Shoenstein

ï‚® The Furnished Room

ï‚® The Last Leaf

ï‚® The Poet and the Peasant

ï‚® A Ramble in Aphasia

ï‚® A Municipal Report

ï‚® Proof of the Pudding

I 

The Gift of the Magi 

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

cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by 

bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher 

until one's cheek burned with the silent imputation of parsimony 

that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. 

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be 

Christmas. 

There was clearly nothing left to do but flop down on the 

shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the 

moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, 

with sniffles predominating. 

While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the 

first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat 

at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it 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 seri­

ously 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 

2 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far. 

Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always 

are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy 

hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Some­

thing 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. Per­

haps 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 shin­

ing like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and 

made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again 

nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood 

still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet. 

On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. 

With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her 

eyes, she fluttered out of the door and down the stairs to the 

street. 

Where she stopped the sign read: 'Mme. Sofronie. Hair Goods 

of All Kinds.' One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, pant­

ing. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the 'Sofronie.' 

'Will you buy my hair?' asked Della. 

'I buy hair,' said Madame. 'Take yer hat off and let's have a 

sight at the looks of it.' 

Down rippled the brown cascade. 

'Twenty dollars,' said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised 

hand. 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 3 

'Give it to me quick,' said Della. 

Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget 

the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim's 

present. 

She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one 

else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had 

turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple 

and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance 

alone and not by meretricious ornamentation - as all good things 

should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it 

she knew that it must be Jim's. It was like him. Quietness and 

value - the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they 

took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. 

With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about 

the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes 

looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he 

used in place of a chain. 

When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to 

prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the 

gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity 

added to love. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends - a 

mammoth task. 

Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, closelying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. 

She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and 

critically. 

'If Jim doesn't kill me,' she said to herself, 'before he takes a 

second look at me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. 

But what could I do - oh! what could I do with a dollar and 

eighty-seven cents?' 

At seven o'clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on 

the back of the stove, hot and ready to cook the chops. 

Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and 

sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. 

Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, 

and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit of saying 

little silent prayers about the simplest everyday things, and now 

she whispered: 'Please God, make him think I am still pretty.' 

The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked 

thin and very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two - and 

to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he 

was without gloves. 

4 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

Jim stepped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the 

scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an 

expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It 

was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any 

of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared 

at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face. 

Della wriggled off the table and went for him. 

'Jim, darling,' she cried, 'don't look at me that way. I had my 

hair cut off and sold it because I couldn't have lived through 

Christmas without giving you a present. It'll grow out again - you 

won't mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully 

fast. Say "Merry Christmas!" Jim, and let's be happy. You don't 

know what a nice - what a beautiful, nice gift I've got for you.' 

'You've cut off your hair?' asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had 

not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental 

labour. 

'Cut it off and sold it,' said Della. 'Don't you like me just as 

well, anyhow? I'm me without my hair, ain't I?' 

Jim looked about the room curiously. 

'You say your hair is gone?' he said with an air almost of idiocy. 

'You needn't look for it,' said Della. 'It's sold, I tell you - sold 

and gone, too. It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went 

for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered,' she went on 

with a sudden serious sweetness, 'but nobody could ever count my 

love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?' 

Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his 

Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some 

inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week 

or a million a year - what is the difference? A mathematician or a 

wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable 

gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be 

illuminated later on. 

Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon 

the table. 

'Don't make any mistake, Dell,' he said, 'about me. I don't think 

there's anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo 

that could make me like my girl any less. But if you'll unwrap that 

package you may see why you had me going awhile at first.' 

White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then 

an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to 

hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment 

of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat. 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 5 

For there lay The Combs - the set of combs, side and back, that 

Della had worshipped for long in a Broadway window. Beautiful 

combs, pure tortoiseshell, with jewelled rims - just the shade to 

wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, 

she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them 

without the least hope of possession. And now they were hers, but 

the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were 

gone. 

But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able 

to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: 'My hair grows so 

fast, Jim!' 

And then Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, 'Oh, 

oh!' 

Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to 

him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed 

to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit. 

'Isn't it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You'll 

have to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your 

watch. I want to see how it looks on it.' 

Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his 

hands under the back of his head and smiled. 

'Dell,' said he, 'let's put our Christmas presents away and keep 

'em awhile. They're too nice to use just at present. I sold the 

watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you 

put the chops on.' 

The magi, as you know, were wise men - wonderfully wise men 

- who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the 

art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no 

doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case 

of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the unevent­

ful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely 

sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But 

in a last word to the wise of these days, let it be said that of all who 

give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive 

gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are 

the magi. 

6 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

II 

A Cosmopolite in a Café 

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

table at which I sat had escaped the eye of incomers, and two 

vacant chairs at it extended their arms with venal hospitality to the 

influx of patrons. 

And then a cosmopolite sat in one of them, and I was glad, for 

I held a theory that since Adam no true citizen of the world has 

existed. We hear of them, and we see foreign labels on much 

luggage, but we find travellers instead of cosmopolites. 

I invoke your consideration of the scene - the marble-topped 

tables, the range of leather-upholstered wall seats, the gay com­

pany, 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 lon­

gitude. 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 dis­

respectfully of the equator, he skipped from continent to conti­

nent, he derided the zones, he mopped up the high seas with his 

napkin. With a wave of his hand he would speak of a certain 

bazaar in Hyderabad. Whiff! He would have you on skis in Lap­

land. 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 arch­

dukes. Anon he would be telling you of a cold he acquired in a 

Chicago lake breeze and how old Escamila cured it in Buenos 

Ayres with a hot infusion of the chuchula weed. You would have 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 7 

addressed the letter to 'E. Rushmore Coglan, Esq., the Earth, 

Solar System, the Universe,' and have mailed it, feeling confident 

that it would be delivered to him. 

I was sure that I had at last found the one true cosmopolite since 

Adam, and I listened to his world-wide discourse fearful lest I 

should discover in it the local note of the mere globe-trotter. But 

his opinions never fluttered or drooped; he was as impartial to 

cities, countries and continents as the winds or gravitation. 

And as E. Rushmore Coglan prattled of this little planet I 

thought with glee of a great almost-cosmopolite who wrote for the 

whole world and dedicated himself to Bombay. In a poem he has 

to say that there is pride and rivalry between the cities of the 

earth, and that 'the men that breed from them, they traffic up and 

down, but cling to their cities' hem as a child to the mother's 

gown.' And whenever they walk 'by roaring streets unknown' they 

remember their native city 'most faithful, foolish, fond; making 

her mere-breathed name their bond upon their bond.' And my 

glee was roused because I had caught Mr. Kipling napping. Here I 

had found a man not made from dust; one who had no narrow 

boasts of birthplace or country, one who, if he bragged at all, 

would brag of his whole round globe against the Martians and the 

inhabitants of the Moon. 

Expression on these subjects was precipitated from E. Rushmore Coglan by the third corner to our table. While Coglan was 

describing to me the topography along the Siberian Railway the 

orchestra glided into a medley. The concluding air was 'Dixie,' 

and as the exhilarating notes tumbled forth they were almost over­

powered 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 Rich­

mond, Va. Oh, certainly; but many a lady has to work now - the 

war, you know. 

8 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

When 'Dixie' was being played a dark-haired young man 

sprang up from somewhere with a Mosby guerrilla yell and waved 

frantically his soft-brimmed hat. Then he strayed through the 

smoke, dropped into the vacant chair at our table and pulled out 

cigarettes. 

The evening was at the period when reserve is thawed. One of 

us mentioned three Würzburgers to the waiter; the dark-haired 

young man acknowledged his inclusion in the order by a smile and 

a nod. I hastened to ask him a question because I wanted to try out 

a theory I had. 

'Would you mind telling me,' I began, 'whether you are from - ' 

The fist of E. Rushmore Coglan banged the table and I was 

jarred into silence. 

'Excuse me,' said he, 'but that's a question I never like to hear 

asked. What does it matter where a man is from? Is it fair to judge 

a man by his post-office address? Why, I've seen Kentuckians who 

hated whisky, Virginians who weren't descended from Pocahon­

tas, 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 Southern­

ers, 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 invari­

ably a native of either Secaucus, N.J., or the district between 

Murray Hill Lyceum and the Harlem River, this city. I was about 

to put my opinion to the test by inquiring of this gentleman when 

you interrupted with your own - larger theory, I must confess.' 

And now the dark-haired young man spoke to me, and it 

became evident that his mind also moved along its own set of 

grooves. 

'I should like to be a periwinkle,' said he, mysteriously, 'on the 

top of a valley, and sing too-ralloo-ralloo.' 

This was clearly too obscure, so I turned again to Coglan. 

'I've been around the world twelve times,' said he. 'I know an 

Esquimau in Upernavik who sends to Cincinnati for his neckties, 

and I saw a goat-herder in Uruguay who won a prize in a Battle 

Creek breakfast-food puzzle competition. I pay rent on a room in 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 9 

Cairo, Egypt, and another in Yokohama all the year round. I've 

got slippers waiting for me in a tea-house in Shanghai, and I don't 

have to tell 'em how to cook my eggs in Rio de Janeiro or Seattle. 

It's a mighty little old world. What's the use of bragging about 

being from the North, or the South, or the old manor-house in 

the dale, or Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, or Pike's Peak, or Fairfax 

County, Va., or Hooligan's Flats or any place? It'll be a better 

world when we quit being fools about some mildewed town or ten 

acres of swampland just because we happened to be born there.' 

'You seem to be a genuine cosmopolite,' I said admiringly. 'But 

it also seems that you would decry patriotism.' 

'A relic of the stone age,' declared Coglan warmly. 'We are all 

brothers - Chinamen, Englishmen, Zulus, Patagonians, and the 

people in the bend of the Kaw River. Some day all this petty pride 

in one's city or state or section or country will be wiped out, and 

we'll all be citizens of the world, as we ought to be.' 

'But while you are wandering in foreign lands,' I persisted, 'do 

not your thoughts revert to some spot - some dear and - ' 

'Nary a spot,' interrupted E. R. Coglan flippantly. 'The terres­

trial, 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 intro­

duced to the King of England hand that monarch, without batting 

his eyes, the information that his grandaunt on his mother's side 

was related by marriage to the Perkinses, of Charleston. I knew a 

New Yorker who was kidnapped for ransom by some Afghanistan 

bandits. His people sent over the money and he came back to 

Kabul with the agent. "Afghanistan?" the natives said to him 

through an interpreter. "Well, not so slow, do you think?" "Oh, I 

don't know," says he, and he begins to tell them about a cab-driver 

at Sixth Avenue and Broadway. Those ideas don't suit me. I'm not 

tied down to anything that isn't 8,000 miles in diameter. Just put 

me down as E. Rushmore Coglan, citizen of the terrestrial sphere.' 

My cosmopolite made a large adieu and left me, for he thought 

that he saw someone through the chatter and smoke whom he 

knew. So I was left with the would-be periwinkle, who was reduced 

to Würzburger without further ability to voice his aspirations to 

perch, melodious, upon the summit of a valley. 

I sat reflecting upon my evident cosmopolite and wondering 

how the poet had managed to miss him. He was my discovery and 

10 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

I believed in him. How was it? 'The men that breed from them 

they traffic up and down, but cling to their cities' hem as a child to 

the mother's gown.' 

Not so E. Rushmore Coglan. With the whole world for his -

My meditations were interrupted by a tremendous noise and 

conflict in another part of the café. I saw above the heads of the 

seated patrons E. Rushmore Coglan and a stranger to me engaged 

in terrific battle. They fought between the tables like Titans, and 

glasses crashed, and men caught their hats up and were knocked 

down, and a brunette screamed, and a blonde began to sing 'Teas­

ing.' 

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 resist­

ing. 

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, foun­

tains and pinochle were playing everywhere. 

The windows of Mrs. Murphy's boarding-house were open. A 

group of boarders were seated on the high stoop upon round, flat 

mats like German pancakes. 

In one of the second-floor front windows Mrs. McCaskey 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 11 

awaited her husband. Supper was cooling on the table. Its heat 

went into Mrs. McCaskey. 

At nine Mr. McCaskey came. He carried his coat on his arm and 

his pipe in his teeth; and he apologized for disturbing the boarders 

on the steps as he selected spots of stone between them on which 

to set his size 9, width Ds. 

As he opened the door of his room he received a surprise. 

Instead of the usual stove-lid or potato-masher for him to dodge, 

came only words. 

Mr. McCaskey reckoned that the benign May moon had soft­

ened the breast of his spouse. 

'I heard ye,' came the oral substitutes for kitchenware. 'Ye can 

apollygize to riff-raff of the streets for settin' yer unhandy feet on 

the tails of their frocks, but ye'd walk on the neck of yer wife the 

length of a clothes-line without so much as a "Kiss me fut," and 

I'm sure, it's that long from rubberin' out the windy for ye and the 

victuals cold such as there's money to buy after drinkin' up yer 

wages at Gallegher's every Saturday evenin', and the gas man here 

twice to-day for his.' 

'Woman!' said Mr. McCaskey, dashing his coat and hat upon a 

chair, 'the noise of ye is an insult to me appetite. When ye run 

down politeness ye take the mortar from between the bricks of the 

foundations of society. 'Tis no more than exercisin' the acrimony 

of a gentleman when ye ask the dissent of ladies blockin' the way 

for steppin' between them. Will ye bring the pig's face of ye out of 

the windy and see to the food?' 

Mrs. McCaskey arose heavily and went to the stove. There was 

something in her manner that warned Mr. McCaskey. When the 

corners of her mouth went down suddenly like a barometer it usually 

foretold a fall of crockery and tinware. 

'Pig's face, is it?' said Mrs. McCaskey, and hurled a stewpan full 

of bacon and turnips at her lord. 

Mr. McCaskey was no novice at repartee. He knew what should 

follow the entree. On the table was a roast sirloin of pork, gar­

nished with shamrocks. He retorted with this, and drew the 

appropriate return of a bread pudding in an earthen dish. A hunk 

of Swiss cheese accurately thrown by her husband struck Mrs. 

McCaskey below one eye. When she replied with a well-aimed 

coffee-pot full of a hot, black, semi-fragrant liquid the battle, 

according to courses, should have ended. 

But Mr. McCaskey was no 50 cent table d'hôter. Let cheap 

Bohemians consider coffee the end, if they would. Let them make 

12 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

that faux pas. He was foxier still. Finger-bowls were not beyond 

the compass of his experience. They were not to be had in the 

Pension Murphy; but their equivalent was at hand. Triumphantly 

he sent the granite-ware wash-basin at the head of his matrimo­

nial 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 down­

stairs caused both her and Mr. McCaskey to pause in a sort of 

involuntary armistice. 

On the sidewalk at the corner of the house Policeman Cleary 

was standing with one ear upturned, listening to the crash of 

household utensils. 

' 'Tis Jawn McCaskey and his missus at it again,' meditated the 

policeman. 'I wonder shall I go up and stop the row. I will not. 

Married folks they are; and few pleasures they have. 'Twill not last 

long. Sure, they'll have to borrow more dishes to keep it up with.' 

And just then came the loud scream below-stairs, betokening 

fear or dire extremity. ' 'Tis probably the cat,' said Policeman 

Cleary, and walked hastily in the other direction. 

The boarders on the steps were fluttered. Mr. Toomey, an 

insurance solicitor by birth and an investigator by profession, 

went inside to analyse the scream. He returned with the news that 

Mrs. Murphy's little boy Mike was lost. Following the messenger, 

out bounced Mrs. Murphy - two hundred pounds in tears and 

hysterics, clutching the air and howling to the sky for the loss of 

thirty pounds of freckles and mischief. Bathos, truly; but Mr. 

Toomey sat down at the side of Miss Purdy, milliner, and their 

hands came together in sympathy. The two old maids, Misses 

Walsh, who complained every day about the noise in the halls, 

inquired immediately if anybody had looked behind the clock. 

Major Grigg, who sat by his fat wife on the top step, arose and 

buttoned his coat. 'The little one lost?' he exclaimed. 'I will scour 

the city.' His wife never allowed him out after dark. But now she 

said: 'Go, Ludovic!' in a baritone voice. 'Whoever can look upon 

that mother's grief without springing to her relief has a heart of 

stone.' 'Give me some thirty or - sixty cents, my love,' said the 

Major. 'Lost children sometimes stray far. I may need car-fares.' 

Old man Denny, hall-room, fourth floor back, who sat on the 

lowest step, trying to read a paper by the street lamp, turned over 

a page to follow up the article about the carpenters' strike. Mrs. 

Murphy shrieked to the moon: 'Oh, ar-r-Mike, f'r Gawd's sake, 

where is me little bit av a boy?' 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 13 

'When'd ye see him last?' asked old man Denny, with one eye 

on the report of the Building Trades League. 

'Oh,' wailed Mrs. Murphy,.' 'twas yisterday, or maybe four 

hours ago! I dunno. But it's lost he is, me little boy Mike. He was 

playin' on the sidewalk only this mornin' - or was it Wednesday? 

I'm that busy with work 'tis hard to keep up with dates. But I've 

looked the house over from top to cellar, and it's gone he is. Oh, 

for the love av Hiven - ' 

Silent, grim, colossal, the big city has ever stood against its 

revilers. They call it hard as iron; they say that no pulse of pity 

beats in its bosom; they compare its streets with lonely forests and 

deserts of lava. But beneath the hard crust of the lobster is found a 

delectable and luscious food. Perhaps a different simile would have 

been wiser. Still, nobody should take offence. We would call no 

one a lobster without good and sufficient claws. 

No calamity so touches the common heart of humanity as does 

the straying of a little child. Their feet are so uncertain and feeble; 

the ways are so steep and strange. 

Major Griggs hurried down to the corner, and up the avenue 

into Billy's place. 'Gimme a rye-high,' he said to the servitor. 

'Haven't seen a bow-legged, dirty-faced little devil of a six-yearold lost kid around here anywhere, have you?' 

Mr. Toomey retained Miss Purdy's hand on the steps. 'Think of 

that dear little babe,' said Miss Purdy, 'lost from his mother's side 

- perhaps already fallen beneath the iron hoofs of galloping steeds 

- oh, isn't it dreadful?' 

'Ain't that right?' agreed Mr. Toomey, squeezing her hand. 'Say 

I start out and help look for um!' 

'Perhaps,' said Miss Purdy, 'you should. But oh, Mr. Toomey, 

you are so dashing - so reckless - suppose in your enthusiasm 

some accident should befall you, then what - ' 

Old man Denny read on about the arbitration agreement, with 

one finger on the lines. 

In the second floor front Mr. and Mrs. McCaskey came to the 

window to recover their second wind. Mr. McCaskey was scoop­

ing turnips out of his vest with a crooked forefinger, and his lady 

was wiping an eye that the salt of the roast pork had not benefited. 

They heard the outcry below, and thrust their heads out of the 

window. 

' 'Tis little Mike is lost,' said Mrs. McCaskey in a hushed voice, 

'the beautiful, little, trouble-making angel of a gossoon!' 

'The bit of a boy mislaid?' said Mr. McCaskey leaning out of 

14 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

the window. 'Why, now, that's bad enough, entirely. The childer, 

they be different. If 'twas a woman I'd be willin', for they leave 

peace behind 'em when they go.' 

Disregarding the thrust, Mrs. McCaskey caught her husband's 

arm. 

'Jawn,' she said sentimentally, 'Missis Murphy's little bye is lost. 

'Tis a great city for losing little boys. Six years old he was. Jawn, 

'tis the same age our little bye would have been if we had had one 

six years ago.' 

'We never did,' said Mr. McCaskey, lingering with the fact. 

'But if we had, Jawn, think what sorrow would be in our hearts 

this night, with our little Phelan run away and stolen in the city 

nowheres at all.' 

'Ye talk foolishness,' said Mr. McCaskey. ' 'Tis Pat he would be 

named, after me old father in Cantrim.' 

'Ye lie!' said Mrs. McCaskey, without anger. 'Me brother was 

worth tin dozen bog-trotting McCaskeys. After him would the bye 

be named.' She leaned over the window-sill and looked down at 

the hurrying and bustle below. 

'Jawn,' said Mrs. McCaskey softly, 'I'm sorry I was hasty wid 

ye.' 

' 'Twas hasty puddin', as ye say,' said her husband, 'and hurryup turnips and get-a-move-on-ye coffee. 'Twas what ye could call 

a quick lunch, all right, and tell no lie.' 

Mrs. McCaskey slipped her arm inside her husband's and took 

his rough hand in hers. 

'Listen at the cryin' of poor Mrs. Murphy,' she said. ' 'Tis an 

awful thing for a bit of a bye to be lost in this great big city. If 

'twas our little Phelan, Jawn, I'd be breakin' me heart.' 

Awkwardly Mr. McCaskey withdrew his hand. But he laid it 

around the nearing shoulders of his wife. 

' 'Tis foolishness, of course,' said he, roughly, 'but I'd be cut up 

some meself, if our little - Pat was kidnapped or anything. But 

there never was any childer for us. Sometimes I've been ugly and 

hard with ye, Judy. Forget it.' 

They leaned together, and looked down at the heart-drama 

being acted below. 

Long they sat thus. People surged along the sidewalk, crowding, 

questioning, filling the air with rumours and inconsequent sur­

mises. Mrs. Murphy ploughed back and forth in their midst, like a 

soft mountain down which plunged an audible cataract of tears. 

Couriers came and went. 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 15 

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

boarding-house. 

'What's up now, Judy?' asked Mr. McCaskey. 

' 'Tis Missis Murphy's voice,' said Mrs. McCaskey, harking. 

'She says she's after finding little Mike asleep behind the roll of 

old linoleum under the bed in her room.' 

Mr. McCaskey laughed loudly. 

'That's yer Phelan,' he shouted sardonically 'Divil a bit would a 

Pat have done that trick if the bye we never had is strayed and 

stole, by the powers, call him Phelan, and see him hide out under 

the bed like a mangy pup.' 

Mrs. McCaskey arose heavily, and went toward the dish closet, 

with the corners of her mouth drawn down. 

Policeman Cleary came back around the corner as the crowd 

dispersed. Surprised, he upturned an ear toward the McCaskey 

apartment where the crash of irons and chinaware and the ring of 

hurled kitchen utensils seemed as loud as before. Policeman 

Cleary took out his timepiece. 

'By the deported snakes!' he exclaimed, 'Jawn McCaskey and his 

lady have been fightin' for an hour and a quarter by the watch. 

The missis could give him forty pounds weight. Strength to his 

arm.' 

Policeman Cleary strolled back around the corner. 

Old man Denny folded his paper and hurried up the steps just 

as Mrs. Murphy was about to lock the door for the night. 

IV 

The Skylight Room 

FIRST MRS . PARKER would show you the double parlours. You 

would not dare to interrupt her description of their advantages 

and of the merits of the gentleman who had occupied them for 

eight years. Then you would manage to stammer forth the confes­

sion that you were neither a doctor nor a dentist. Mrs. Parker's 

manner of receiving the admission was such that you could never 

afterward entertain the same feeling toward your parents, who had 

neglected to train you up in one of the professions that fitted Mrs. 

Parker's parlours. 

Next you ascended one flight of stairs and looked at the second 

floor back at $8. Convinced by her second-floor manner that it 

16 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

was worth the $12 that Mr. Toosenberry always paid for it until 

he left to take charge of his brother's orange plantation in Florida 

near Palm Beach, where Mrs. McIntyre always spent the winters 

that had the double front room with private bath, you managed to 

babble that you wanted something still cheaper. 

If you survived Mrs. Parker's scorn, you were taken to look at 

Mr. Skidder's large hall-room on the third floor. Mr. Skidder's 

room was not vacant. He wrote plays and smoked cigarettes in it 

all day long. But every room-hunter was made to visit his room to 

admire the lambrequins. After each visit, Mr. Skidder, from the 

fright caused by possible eviction, would pay something on his 

rent. 

Then - oh, then - if you still stood on one foot with your hot 

hand clutching the three moist dollars in your pocket, and 

hoarsely proclaimed your hideous and culpable poverty, never­

more would Mrs. Parker be cicerone of yours. She would honk 

loudly the word 'Clara,' she would show you her back, and march 

downstairs. Then Clara, the coloured maid, would escort you up 

the carpeted ladder that served for the fourth flight, and show you 

the Skylight Room. It occupied 7 by 8 feet of floorspace at the 

middle of the hall. On each side of it was a dark lumber closet or 

store-room. 

In it was an iron cot, a washstand and a chair. A shelf was the 

dresser. Its four bare walls seemed to close in upon you like the 

sides of a coin. Your hand crept to your throat, you gasped, you 

looked up as from a well - and breathed once more. Through the 

glass of the little skylight you saw a square of blue infinity. 

'Two dollars, suh,' Clara would say in her half-contemptuous, 

half-Tuskegeenial tones. 

One day Miss Leeson came hunting for a room. She carried a 

typewriter made to be lugged around by a much larger lady. She 

was a very little girl, with eyes and hair that kept on growing after 

she had stopped and that always looked as if they were saying: 

'Goodness me. Why didn't you keep up with us?' 

Mrs. Parker showed her the double parlours. 'In this closet,' she 

said, 'one could keep a skeleton or anaesthetic or coal - ' 

'But I am neither a doctor nor a dentist,' said Miss Leeson with 

a shiver. 

Mrs. Parker gave her the incredulous, pitying, sneering, icy 

stare that she kept for those who failed to qualify as doctors or 

dentists, and led the way to the second floor back. 

'Eight dollars?' said Miss Leeson. 'Dear me! I'm not Hetty if I 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 17 

do look green. I'm just a poor little working girl. Show me some­

thing higher and lower.' 

Mr. Skidder jumped and strewed the floor with cigarette stubs 

at the rap on his door. 

'Excuse me, Mr. Skidder,' said Mrs. Parker, with her demon's 

smile at his pale looks. 'I didn't know you were in. I asked the lady 

to have a look at your lambrequins.' 

'They're too lovely for anything,' said Miss Leeson, smiling in 

exactly the way the angels do. 

After they had gone Mr. Skidder got very busy erasing the 

tall, black-haired heroine from his latest (unproduced) play and 

inserting a small, roguish one with heavy, bright hair and vivacious 

features. 

'Anna Held'll jump at it,' said Mr. Skidder to himself, putting 

his feet up against the lambrequins and disappearing in a cloud of 

smoke like an aerial cuttlefish. 

Presently the tocsin call of 'Clara!' sounded to the world the 

state of Miss Leeson's purse. A dark goblin seized her, mounted 

a Stygian stairway, thrust her into a vault with a glimmer of light 

in its top and muttered the menacing and cabalistic words 'Two 

dollars!' 

'I'll take it!' sighed Miss Leeson, sinking down upon the 

squeaky iron bed. 

Every day Miss Leeson went out to work. At night she brought 

home papers with handwriting on them and made copies with her 

typewriter. Sometimes she had no work at night, and then she 

would sit on the steps of the high stoop with the other roomers. 

Miss Leeson was not intended for a skylight room when the plans 

were drawn for her creation. She was gay-hearted and full of 

tender, whimsical fancies. Once she let Mr. Skidder read to her 

three acts of his great (unpublished) comedy, 'It's No Kid; or, The 

Heir of the Subway.' 

There was rejoicing among the gentlemen roomers whenever 

Miss Leeson had time to sit on the steps for an hour or two. But 

Miss Longnecker, the tall blonde who taught in a public school 

and said 'Well, really!' to everything you said, sat on the top step 

and sniffed. And Miss Dorn, who shot at the moving ducks at 

Coney every Sunday and worked in a department store, sat on the 

bottom step and sniffed. Miss Leeson sat on the middle step, and 

the men would quickly group around her. 

Especially Mr. Skidder, who had cast her in his mind for the 

star part in a private, romantic (unspoken) drama in real life. And 

18 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

especially Mr. Hoover, who was forty-five, fat, flushed and foolish. 

And especially very young Mr. Evans, who set up a hollow cough 

to induce her to ask him to leave off cigarettes. The men voted her 

'the funniest and jolliest ever,' but the sniffs on the top step and 

the lower step were implacable. 

• • • • • 

I pray you let the drama halt while Chorus stalks to the foot­

lights 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 cast­

ing 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 Jack­

son.' 

'Well, really!' said Miss Longnecker. 'I didn't know you were an 

astronomer, Miss Leeson.' 

'Oh, yes,' said the small star-gazer, 'I know as much as any of 

them about the style of sleeves they're going to wear next fall in 

Mars.' 

'Well, really!' said Miss Longnecker. 'The star you refer to is 

Gamma, of the constellation Cassiopeia. It is nearly of the second 

magnitude, and its meridian passage is - ' 

'Oh,' said the very young Mr. Evans, 'I think Billy Jackson is a 

much better name for it. 

'Same here,' said Mr. Hoover, loudly breathing defiance to Miss 

Longnecker. 'I think Miss Leeson has just as much right to name 

stars as any of those old astrologers had.' 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 19 

'Well, really!' said Miss Longnecker. 

'I wonder whether it's a shooting star,' remarked Miss Dorn. 'I 

hit nine ducks and a rabbit out of ten in the gallery at Coney 

Sunday.' 

'He doesn't show up very well from down here,' said Miss 

Leeson. 'You ought to see him from my room. You know you can 

see stars even in the daytime from the bottom of a well. At night 

my room is like the shaft of a coal-mine, and it makes Billy Jackson 

look like the big diamond pin that Night fastens her kimono with.' 

There came a time after that when Miss Leeson brought no for­

midable papers home to copy. And when she went in the morning, 

instead of working, she went from office to office and let her heart 

melt away in the drip of cold refusals transmitted through insolent 

office boys. This went on. 

There came an evening when she wearily climbed Mrs. Parker's 

stoop at the hour when she always returned from her dinner at the 

restaurant. But she had had no dinner. 

As she stepped into the hall Mr. Hoover met her and seized his 

chance. He asked her to marry him, and his fatness hovered above 

her like an avalanche. She dodged, and caught the balustrade. He 

tried for her hand, and she raised it and smote him weakly in the 

face. Step by step she went up, dragging herself by the railing. 

She passed Mr. Skidder's door as he was red-inking a stage direc­

tion 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 inef­

fectually, named. Miss Longnecker must be right; it was Gamma, 

of the constellation Cassiopeia, and not Billy Jackson. And yet she 

could not let it be Gamma. 

As she lay on her back she tried twice to raise her arm. The 

third time she got two thin fingers to her lips and blew a kiss out 

of the black pit to Billy Jackson. Her arm fell back limply. 

'Good-bye, Billy,' she murmured faintly. 'You're millions of 

20 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

miles away and you won't even twinkle once. But you kept where I 

could see you most of the time up there when there wasn't any­

thing else but darkness to look at, didn't you? . . . Millions of 

miles.... Good-bye, Billy Jackson.' 

Clara, the coloured maid, found the door locked at ten the next 

day, and they forced it open. Vinegar, and the slapping of wrists 

and even burnt feathers, proving of no avail, someone ran to 

'phone for an ambulance. 

In due time it backed up to the door with much gong-clanging, 

and the capable young medico, in his white linen coat, ready, 

active, confident, with his smooth face half debonair, half grim, 

danced up the steps. 

'Ambulance call to 49,' he said briefly. 'What's the trouble?' 

'Oh yes, doctor,' sniffed Mrs. Parker, as though her trouble that 

there should be trouble in the house was the greater. 'I can't think 

what can be the matter with her. Nothing we could do would 

bring her to. It's a young woman, a Miss Elsie - yes, a Miss Elsie 

Leeson. Never before in my house - ' 

'What room?' cried the doctor in a terrible voice, to which Mrs. 

Parker was a stranger. 

'The skylight room. It - ' 

Evidently the ambulance doctor was familiar with the location 

of skylight rooms. He was gone up the stairs, four at a time. Mrs. 

Parker followed slowly, as her dignity demanded. 

On the first landing she met him coming back bearing the 

astronomer in his arms. He stopped and let loose the practised 

scalpel of his tongue, not loudly. Gradually Mrs. Parker crumpled 

as a stiff garment that slips down from a nail. Ever afterwards 

there remained crumples in her mind and body. Sometimes her 

curious roomers would ask her what the doctor said to her. 

'Let that be,' she would answer. 'If I can get forgiveness for 

having heard it I will be satisfied.' 

The ambulance physician strode with his burden through the 

pack of hounds that follow the curiosity chase, and even they fell 

back along the sidewalk abashed, for his face was that of one who 

bears his own dead. 

They noticed that he did not lay down upon the bed prepared 

for it in the ambulance the form that he carried, and all that he 

said was: 'Drive like h - l, Wilson,' to the driver. 

That is all. Is it a story? In the next morning's paper I saw a 

little news item, and the last sentence of it may help you (as it 

helped me) to weld the incidents together. 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 21 

It recounted the reception into Bellevue Hospital of a young 

woman who had been removed from No. 49 East - Street, suffer­

ing from debility induced by starvation. It concluded with these 

words: 

'Dr. William Jackson, the ambulance physician who attended 

the case, says the patient will recover.' 

V 

A Service of Love 

WHEN ONE LOVES ONES ART no service seems too hard. 

That is our premise. This story shall draw a conclusion from it, 

and show at the same time that the premise is incorrect. That will 

be a new thing in logic, and a feat in story-telling somewhat older 

than the Great Wall of China. 

Joe Larrabee came out of the post-oak flats of the Middle West 

pulsing with a genius for pictorial art. At six he drew a picture of 

the town pump with a prominent citizen passing it hastily. This 

effort was framed and hung in the drug store window by the side 

of the ear of corn with an uneven number of rows. At twenty he 

left for New York with a flowing necktie and a capital tied up 

somewhat closer. 

Delia Caruthers did things in six octaves so promisingly in a 

pine-tree village in the South that her relatives chipped in enough 

in her chip hat for her to go 'North' and 'finish.' They could not 

see her f -, but that is our story 

Joe and Delia met in an atelier where a number of art and music 

students had gathered to discuss chiaroscuro, Wagner, music, 

Rembrandt's works pictures, Waldteufel, wall-paper, Chopin, and 

Oolong. 

Joe and Delia became enamoured one of the other or each of 

the other, as you please, and in a short time were married - for 

(see above), when one loves one's Art no service seem too hard. 

Mr. and Mrs. Larrabee began housekeeping in a flat. It was a 

lonesome flat - something like the A sharp way down at the lefthand end of the keyboard. And they were happy; for they had their 

Art and they had each other. And my advice to the rich young man 

would be - sell all thou hast, and give it to the poor - janitor for 

the privilege of living in a flat with your Art and your Delia. 

Flat-dwellers shall endorse my dictum that theirs is the only 

22 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

true happiness. If a home is happy it cannot fit too close - let the 

dresser collapse and become a billiard table; let the mantel turn to 

a rowing machine, the escritoire to a spare bedchamber, the washstand to an upright piano; let the four walls come together, if they 

will, so you and your Delia are between. But if home be the other 

kind, let it be wide and long - enter you at the Golden Gate, hang 

your hat on Hatteras, your cape on Cape Horn, and go out by 

Labrador. 

Joe was painting in the class of the great Magister - you know 

his fame. His fees are high; his lessons are light - his high-lights 

have brought him renown. Delia was studying under Rosenstock -

you know his repute as a disturber of the piano keys. 

They were mighty happy as long as their money lasted. So is 

every - but I will not be cynical. Their aims were very clear and 

defined. Joe was to become capable very soon of turning out pic­

tures 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 - ambi­

tions interwoven each with the other's or else inconsiderable - the 

mutual help and inspiration; and - overlook my artlessness -

stuffed olives and cheese sandwiches at 11p.m. 

But after awhile Art flagged. It sometimes does, even if some 

switchman doesn't flag it. Everything going out and nothing 

coming in, as the vulgarians say. Money was lacking to pay Mr. 

Magister and Herr Rosenstock their prices. When one loves one's 

Art no service seems too hard. So, Delia said she must give music 

lessons to keep the chafing dish bubbling. 

For two or three days she went out canvassing for pupils. One 

evening she came home elated. 

'Joe, dear,' she said gleefully, 'I've a pupil. And, oh, the loveliest 

people! General - General A. B. Pinkney's daughter - on Seventyfirst Street. Such a splendid house, Joe - you ought to see the 

front door! Byzantine I think you would call it. And inside! Oh, 

Joe, I never saw anything like it before. 

'My pupil is his daughter Clementina. I dearly love her already. 

She's a delicate thing - dresses always in white; and the sweetest, 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 23 

simplest manners! Only eighteen years old. I'm to give three 

lessons a week; and, just think, Joe! $5 a lesson. I don't mind it a 

bit; for when I get two or three more pupils I can resume my 

lessons with Herr Rosenstock. Now, smooth out that wrinkle 

between your brows, dear, and let's have a nice supper.' 

'That's all right for you, Dele,' said Joe, attacking a can of peas 

with a carving knife and a hatchet, 'but how about me? Do you 

think I'm going to let you hustle for wages while I philander in the 

regions of high art? Not by the bones of Benvenuto Cellini! I 

guess I can sell papers or lay cobblestones, and bring in a dollar or 

two.' 

Delia came and hung about his neck. 

'Joe, dear, you are silly. You must keep on at your studies. It is 

not as if I had quit my music and gone to work at something else. 

While I teach I learn. I am always with my music. And we can live 

as happily as millionaires on $15 a week. You mustn't think of 

leaving Mr. Magister.' 

'All right,' said Joe, reaching for the blue scalloped vegetable 

dish. 'But I hate for you to be giving lessons. It isn't Art. But 

you're a trump and a dear to do it.' 

'When one loves one's Art no service seems too hard,' said 

Delia. 

'Magister praised the sky in that sketch I made in the park,' said 

Joe. 'And Tinkle gave me permission to hang two of them in his 

window. I may sell one if the right kind of a moneyed idiot sees 

them.' 

'I'm sure you will,' said Delia sweetly. 'And now let's be thankful 

for General Pinkney and this veal roast.' 

During all of the next week the Larrabees had an early break­

fast. 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, tri­

umphantly tossed three five-dollar bills on the 8 by 10 (inches) 

centre table of the 8 by 10 (feet) flat parlour. 

'Sometimes,' she said, a little wearily, 'Clementina tries me. I'm 

afraid she doesn't practise enough, and I have to tell her the same 

things so often. And then she always dresses entirely in white, and 

that does get monotonous. But General Pinkney is the dearest old 

man! I wish you could know him, Joe. He comes in sometimes 

24 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

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

know - and stands there pulling his white goatee. "And how are 

the semiquavers and the demi-semiquavers progressing?" he 

always asks. 

'I wish you could see the wainscoting in that drawing-room, 

Joe! And those Astrakhan rug portières. And Clementina has such a 

funny little cough. I hope she is stronger than she looks. Oh, I 

really am getting attached to her, she is so gentle and high bred. 

General Pinkney's brother was once Minister to Bolivia.' 

And then Joe, with the air of a Monte Cristo, drew forth a ten, a 

five, a two and a one - all legal tender notes - and laid them beside 

Delia's earnings. 

'Sold that water-colour of the obelisk to a man from Peoria,' he 

announced overwhelmingly. 

'Don't joke with me,' said Delia - 'not from Peoria!' 

'All the way. I wish you could see him, Dele. Fat man with a 

woollen muffler and a quill toothpick. He saw the sketch in 

Tinkle's window and thought it was a windmill at first. He was 

game, though, and bought it anyhow. He ordered another - an oil 

sketch of the Lackawanna freight depot - to take back with him. 

Music lessons! Oh, I guess Art is still in it.' 

'I'm so glad you've kept on,' said Delia heartily. 'You're bound 

to win, dear. Thirty-three dollars! We never had so much to spend 

before. We'll have oysters to-night.' 

'And filet mignon with champignons,' said Joe. 'Where is the 

olive fork?' 

On the next Saturday evening Joe reached home first. He 

spread his $18 on the parlour table and washed what seemed to be 

a great deal of dark paint from his hands. 

Half an hour later Delia arrived, her right hand tied up in a 

shapeless bundle of wraps and bandages. 

'How is this?' asked Joe after the usual greetings. 

Delia laughed, but not very joyously. 

'Clementina,' she explained, 'insisted upon a Welsh rabbit after 

her lesson. She is such a queer girl. Welsh rabbits at five in the 

afternoon. The General was there. You should have seen him run 

for the chafing dish, Joe, just as if there wasn't a servant in the 

house. I know Clementina isn't in good health; she is so nervous. 

In serving the rabbit she spilled a great lot of it, boiling hot, over 

my hand and wrist. It hurt awfully, Joe. And the dear girl was so 

sorry! But General Pinkney! - Joe, that old man nearly went distracted. He rushed downstairs and sent somebody - they said the 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 25 

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

for some oil and things to bind it up with. It doesn't hurt so much 

now.' 

'What's this?' asked Joe, taking the hand tenderly and pulling at 

some white strands beneath the bandages. 

'It's something soft,' said Delia, 'that had oil on it. Oh, Joe, did 

you sell another sketch?' She had seen the money on the table. 

'Did I?' said Joe. 'Just ask the man from Peoria. He got his 

depot to-day, and he isn't sure but he thinks he wants another 

parkscape and a view on the Hudson. What time this afternoon 

did you burn your hand, Dele?' 

'Five o'clock, I think,' said Dele plaintively. 'The iron - I mean 

the rabbit came off the fire about that time. You ought to have 

seen General Pinkney, Joe, when - ' 

'Sit down here a moment, Dele,' said Joe. He drew her to the 

couch, sat down beside her and put his arm across her shoulders. 

'What have you been doing for the last two weeks, Dele?' he 

asked. 

She braved it for a moment or two with an eye full of love and 

stubbornness, and murmured a phrase or two vaguely of General 

Pinkney; but at length down went her head and out came the truth 

and tears. 

'I couldn't get any pupils,' she confessed. 'And I couldn't bear to 

have you give up your lessons; and I got a place ironing shirts in 

that big Twenty-fourth Street laundry. And I think I did very well 

to make up both General Pinkney and Clementina, don't you, 

Joe? And when a girl in the laundry set down a hot iron on my 

hand this afternoon I was all the way home making up that story 

about the Welsh rabbit. You're not angry are you, Joe? And if I 

hadn't got the work you mightn't have sold your sketches to that 

man from Peoria.' 

'He wasn't from Peoria,' said Joe slowly. 

'Well, it doesn't matter where he was from. How clever you are, 

Joe - and - kiss me, Joe - and what made you ever suspect that I 

wasn't giving music lessons to Clementina?' 

'I didn't,' said Joe, 'until to-night. And I wouldn't have then, 

only I sent up this cotton waste and oil from the engine-room this 

afternoon for a girl upstairs who had her hand burned with a 

smoothing-iron. I've been firing the engine in that laundry for the 

last two weeks.' 

'And then you didn't - ' 

'My purchaser from Peoria,' said Joe, 'and General Pinkney are 

26 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

both creations of the same art - but you wouldn't call it either 

painting or music. 

And then they both laughed, and Joe began: 

'When one loves one's Art no service seems - ' 

But Delia stopped him with her hand on his lips. 'No,' she said -

'just "When one loves." ' 

VI 

The Coming-out of Maggie 

EVERY SATURDAY NIGHT the Clover Leaf Social Club gave a hop 

in the hall of the Give and Take Athletic Association on the East 

Side. In order to attend one of these dances you must be a 

member of the Give and Take - or, if you belong to the division 

that starts off with the right foot in waltzing, you must work in 

Rhinegold's paper-box factory. Still, any Clover Leaf was privi­

leged 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 organiza­

tions in joyous combat. Between these more serious occupations the 

Saturday night hops with the paper-box factory girls came as a refin­

ing influence and as an efficient screen. For sometimes the tip went 

'round, and if you were among the elect that tiptoed up the dark back 

stairway you might see as neat and satisfying a little welter-weight 

affair to a finish as ever happened inside the ropes. 

On Saturdays Rhinegold's paper-box factory closed at 3 p.m. 

On one such afternoon Anna and Maggie walked homeward 

together. At Maggie's door Anna said, as usual: 'Be ready at seven, 

sharp, Mag; and Jimmy and me'll come by for you.' 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 27 

But what was this? Instead of the customary humble and grate­

ful thanks from the non-escorted one there was to be perceived a 

high-poised head, a prideful dimpling at the corners of a broad 

mouth, and almost a sparkle in a dull brown eye. 

'Thanks, Anna,' said Maggie; 'but you and Jimmy needn't 

bother to-night. I've a gentleman friend that's coming 'round to 

escort me to the hop.' 

The comely Anna pounced upon her friend, shook her, chided 

and beseeched her. Maggie Toole catch a fellow! Plain, dear, 

loyal, unattractive Maggie, so sweet as a chum, so unsought for a 

two-step or a moonlit bench in the little park. How was it? When 

did it happen? Who was it? 

'You'll see to-night,' said Maggie, flushed with the wine of the 

first grapes she had gathered in Cupid's vineyard. 'He's swell all 

right. He's two inches taller than Jimmy, and an up-to-date 

dresser. I'll introduce him, Anna, just as soon as we get to the hall.' 

Anna and Jimmy were among the first Clover Leafs to arrive 

that evening. Anna's eyes were brightly fixed upon the door of the 

hall to catch the first glimpse of her friend's 'catch.' 

At 8.30 Miss Toole swept into the hall with her escort. Quickly 

her triumphant eye discovered her chum under the wing of her 

faithful Jimmy. 

'Oh, gee!' cried Anna, 'Mag ain't made a hit - oh, no! Swell 

fellow? Well, I guess! Style? Look at 'um.' 

'Go as far as you like,' said Jimmy, with sandpaper in his voice. 

'Cop him out if you want him. These new guys always win out 

with the push. Don't mind me. He don't squeeze all the limes, I 

guess. Huh!' 

'Shut up, Jimmy. You know what I mean. I'm glad for Mag. 

First fellow she ever had. Oh, here they come.' 

Across the floor Maggie sailed like a coquettish yacht convoyed 

by a stately cruiser. And truly, her companion justified the 

encomiums of the faithful chum. He stood two inches taller than 

the average Give and Take athlete; his dark hair curled; his eyes 

and his teeth flashed whenever he bestowed his frequent smiles. 

The young men of the Clover Leaf Club pinned not their faith to 

the graces of person as much as they did to its prowess, its 

achievements in hand-to-hand conflicts, and its preservation from 

the legal duress that constantly menaced it. The member of the 

association who would bind a paper-box maiden to his conquering 

chariot scorned to employ Beau Brummel airs. They were not 

considered honourable methods of warfare. The swelling biceps, 

28 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

the coat straining at its buttons over the chest, the air of conscious 

conviction of the super-eminence of the male in the cosmogony of 

creation, even a calm display of bow legs as subduing and enchant­

ing agents in the gentle tourneys of Cupid - these were the 

approved arms and ammunition of the Clover Leaf gallants. They 

viewed, then, the genuflexions and alluring poses of this visitor 

with their chins at a new angle. 

'A friend of mine, Mr. Terry O'Sullivan,' was Maggie's formula 

of introduction. She led him around the room, presenting him to 

each new-arriving Clover Leaf. Almost was she pretty now, with 

the unique luminosity in her eyes that comes to a girl with her 

first suitor and a kitten with its first mouse. 

'Maggie Toole's got a fellow at last,' was the word that went 

round among the paper-box girls. 'Pipe Mag's floor-walker' - thus 

the Give and Takes expressed their indifferent contempt. 

Usually at the weekly hops Maggie kept a spot on the wall warm 

with her back. She felt and showed so much gratitude whenever a 

self-sacrificing partner invited her to dance that his pleasure was 

cheapened and diminished. She had even grown used to noticing 

Anna joggle the reluctant Jimmy with her elbow as a signal for 

him to invite her chum to walk over his feet through a two-step. 

But to-night the pumpkin had turned to a coach and six. Terry 

O'Sullivan was a victorious Prince Charming, and Maggie Toole 

winged her first butterfly flight. And though our tropes of fairy­

land 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 succes­

sion with the paper-box girl that Dempsey Donovan brought. 

Dempsey was the leader of the association. He wore a dress suit, 

and could chin the bar twice with one hand. He was one of 'Big 

Mike' O'Sullivan's lieutenants, and was never troubled by trouble. 

No cop dared to arrest him. Whenever he broke a push-cart man's 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 29 

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

Literary Association in the kneecap, an officer would drop around 

and say: 

'The Cap'n'd like to see ye a few minutes round to the office 

whin ye have time, Dempsey, me boy.' 

But there would be sundry gentlemen there with large gold fob 

chains and black cigars; and somebody would tell a funny story, 

and then Dempsey would go back and work half an hour with the 

six-pound dumb-bells. So, doing a tight-rope act on a wire 

stretched across Niagara was a safe terpsichorean performance 

compared with waltzing twice with Dempsey Donovan's paperbox girl. At ten o'clock the jolly round face of 'Big Mike' O'Sulli­

van shone at the door for five minutes upon the scene. He always 

looked in for five minutes, smiled at the girls and handed out real 

perfectos to the delighted boys. 

Dempsey Donovan was at his elbow instantly, talking rapidly. 

'Big Mike' looked carefully at the dancers, smiled, shook his head 

and departed. 

The music stopped. The dancers scattered to the chairs along 

the walls. Terry O'Sullivan, with his entrancing bow, relinquished 

a pretty girl in blue to her partner and started back to find 

Maggie. Dempsey intercepted him in the middle of the floor. 

Some fine instinct that Rome must have bequeathed to us 

caused nearly every one to turn and look at them - there was a 

subtle feeling that two gladiators had met in the arena. Two or 

three Give and Takes with tight coat-sleeves drew nearer. 

'One moment, Mr. O'Sullivan,' said Dempsey. 'I hope you're 

enjoying yourself. Where did you say you lived? 

The two gladiators were well matched. Dempsey had, perhaps, 

ten pounds of weight to give away. The O'Sullivan had breadth 

with quickness. Dempsey had a glacial eye, a dominating slit of a 

mouth, an indestructible jaw, a complexion like a belle's and the 

coolness of a champion. The visitor showed more fire in his con­

tempt and less control over his conspicuous sneer. They were ene­

mies by the law written when the rocks were molten. They were 

each too splendid, too mighty, too incomparable to divide pre­

eminence. One only must survive. 

'I live on Grand,' said O'Sullivan insolently; 'and no trouble to 

find me at home. Where do you live?' 

Dempsey ignored the question. 

'You say your name's O'Sullivan,' he went on. 'Well, "Big 

Mike" says he never saw you before.' 

30 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

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

'As a rule,' went on Dempsey, huskily sweet, 'O'Sullivans in this 

district know one another. You escorted one of our lady members 

here, and we want a chance to make good. If you've got a family 

tree let's see a few historical O'Sullivan buds come out on it. Or 

do you want us to dig it out of you by the roots?' 

'Suppose you mind your own business,' suggested O'Sullivan 

blandly. 

Dempsey's eyes brightened. He held up an inspired forefinger 

as though a brilliant idea had struck him. 

'I've got it now,' he said cordially. 'It was just a little mistake. 

You ain't no O'Sullivan. You are a ring-tailed monkey. Excuse us 

for not recognizing you at first.' 

O'Sullivan's eye flashed. He made a quick movement, but Andy 

Geoghan was ready and caught his arm. 

Dempsey nodded at Andy and William McMahan, the secretary of 

the club, and walked rapidly toward a door at the rear of the hall. 

Two other members of the Give and Take Association swiftly joined 

the little group. Terry O'Sullivan was now in the hands of the Board 

of Rules and Social Referees. They spoke to him briefly and softly, 

and conducted him out through the same door at the rear. 

This movement on the part of the Clover Leaf members 

requires a word of elucidation. Back of the association hall was a 

smaller room rented by the club. In this room personal difficulties 

that arose on the ballroom floor were settled, man to man, with 

the weapons of nature, under the supervision of the Board. No 

lady could say that she had witnessed a fight at a Clover Leaf hop 

in several years. Its gentlemen members guaranteed that. 

So easily and smoothly had Dempsey and the Board done their 

preliminary work that many in the hall had not noticed the check­

ing of the fascinating O'Sullivan's social triumph. Among these 

was Maggie. She looked about for her escort. 

'Smoke up!' said Rose Cassidy. 'Wasn't you on? Demps Dono­

van picked a scrap with your Lizzie-boy, and they've waltzed out 

to the slaughter-room with him. How's my hair look done up this 

way, Mag?' 

Maggie laid a hand on the bosom of her cheesecloth waist. 

'Gone to fight with Dempsey!' she said breathlessly. 'They've 

got to be stopped. Dempsey Donovan can't fight him. Why, he'll -

he'll kill him!' 

'Ah, what do you care?' said Rosa. 'Don't some of 'em fight 

every hop?' 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 31 

But Maggie was off, darting her zigzag way through the maze of 

dancers. She burst through the rear door into the dark hall and 

then threw her solid shoulder against the door of the room of 

single combat. It gave way, and in the instant that she entered her 

eye caught the scene - the Board standing about with open 

watches; Dempsey Donovan in his shirt-sleeves dancing, lightfooted, with the wary grace of the modern pugilist, within easy 

reach of his adversary; Terry O'Sullivan standing with arm folded 

and a murderous look in his dark eyes. And without slacking the 

speed of her entrance she leaped forward with a scream - leaped in 

time to catch and hang upon the arm of O'Sullivan that was sud­

denly uplifted, and to whisk from it the long, bright stiletto that 

he had drawn from his bosom. 

The knife fell and rang upon the floor. Cold steel drawn in the 

rooms of the Give and Take Association! Such a thing had never 

happened before. Every one stood motionless for a minute. Andy 

Geoghan kicked the stiletto with the toe of his shoe curiously, like 

an antiquarian who has come upon some ancient weapon 

unknown to his learning. 

And then O'Sullivan hissed something unintelligible between 

his teeth. Dempsey and the Board exchanged looks. And then 

Dempsey looked at O'Sullivan without anger as one looks at a 

stray dog, and nodded his head in the direction of the door. 

'The back stairs, Giuseppi,' he said briefly. 'Somebody'll pitch 

your hat down after you.' 

Maggie walked up to Dempsey Donovan. There was a brilliant 

spot of red in her cheeks, down which slow tears were running. 

But she looked him bravely in the eye. 

'I knew it, Dempsey,' she said, as her eyes grew dull even in 

their tears. 'I knew he was a Guinea. His name's Tony Spinelli. I 

hurried in when they told me you and him was scrappin'. Them 

Guineas always carries knives. But you don't understand, 

Dempsey. I never had a fellow in my life. I got tired of comin' 

with Anna and Jimmy every night, so I fixed it with him to call 

himself O'Sullivan, and brought him along. I knew there'd be 

nothin' doin' for him if he came as a Dago. I guess I'll resign from 

the club now.' 

Dempsey turned to Andy Geoghan. 

'Chuck that cheese slicer out of the window,' he said, 'and tell 

'em inside that Mr. O'Sullivan has had a telephone message to go 

down to Tammany Hall.' 

And then he turned back to Maggie. 

32 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

'Say, Mag,' he said, 'I'll see you home. And how about next Sat­

urday night? Will you come to the hop with me if I call around for 

you?' 

It was remarkable how quickly Maggie's eyes could change from 

dull to a shining brown. 

'With you, Dempsey?' she stammered. 'Say - will a duck swim?' 

VII 

The Cop and the Anthem 

ON 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 quar­

ters. Just as his more fortunate fellow New Yorkers had bought 

their tickets to Palm Beach and the Riviera each winter, so Soapy 

had made his humble arrangements for his annual hegira to the 

Island. And now the time was come. On the previous night three 

Sabbath newspapers, distributed beneath his coat, about his ankles 

and over his lap, had failed to repulse the cold as he slept on his 

bench near the spurting fountain in the ancient square. So the 

Island loomed large and timely in Soapy's mind. He scorned the 

provisions made in the name of charity for the city's dependents. 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 33 

In Soapy's opinion the Law was more benign than Philanthropy. 

There was an endless round of institutions, municipal and 

eleemosynary, on which he might set out and receive lodging and 

food accordant with the simple life. But to one of Soapy's proud 

spirit the gifts of charity are encumbered. If not in coin you must 

pay in humiliation of spirit for every benefit received at the hands 

of philanthropy. As Caesar had his Brutus, every bed of charity 

must have its toll of a bath, every loaf of bread its compensation of 

a private and personal inquisition. Wherefore it is better to be a 

guest of the law, which, though conducted by rules, does not 

meddle unduly with a gentleman's private affairs. 

Soapy, having decided to go to the Island, at once set about 

accomplishing his desire. There were many easy ways of doing 

this. The pleasantest was to dine luxuriously at some expensive 

restaurant; and then, after declaring insolvency, be handed over 

quietly and without uproar to a policeman. An accommodating 

magistrate would do the rest. 

Soapy left his bench and strolled out of the square and across 

the level sea of asphalt, where Broadway and Fifth Avenue flow 

together, Up Broadway he turned, and halted at a glittering café, 

where are gathered together nightly the choicest products of the 

grape, the silkworm and the protoplasm. 

Soapy had confidence in himself from the lowest button of his vest 

upward. He was shaven, and his coat was decent and his neat black, 

ready-tied four-in-hand had been presented to him by a lady mis­

sionary on Thanksgiving Day. If he could reach a table in the restau­

rant 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 cov­

eted Island was not to be an epicurean one. Some other way of 

entering limbo must be thought of. 

34 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

At a corner of Sixth Avenue electric lights and cunningly dis­

played 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 half­

way 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, flap­

jacks, doughnuts and pie. And then to the waiter he betrayed the 

fact that the minutest coin and himself were strangers. 

'Now, get busy and call a cop,' said Soapy. 'And don't keep a 

gentleman waiting.' 

'No cop for youse,' said the waiter, with a voice like butter cakes 

and an eye like the cherry in a Manhattan cocktail. 'Hey, Con!' 

Neatly upon his left ear on the callous pavement two waiters 

pitched Soapy. He arose, joint by joint, as a carpenter's rule opens, 

and beat the dust from his clothes. Arrest seemed but a rosy 

dream. The Island seemed very far away. A policeman who stood 

before a drug store two doors away laughed and walked down the 

street. 

Five blocks Soapy travelled before his courage permitted him to 

woo capture again. This time the opportunity presented what he 

fatuously termed to himself a 'cinch.' A young woman of a modest 

and pleasing guise was standing before a show window gazing with 

sprightly interest at its display of shaving mugs and inkstands, and 

two yards from the window a large policeman of severe 

demeanour leaned against a water-plug. 

It was Soapy's design to assume the role of the despicable and 

execrated 'masher.' The refined and elegant appearance of his 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 35 

victim and the contiguity of the conscientious cop encouraged him 

to believe that he would soon feel the pleasant official clutch upon 

his arm that would ensure his winter quarters on the right little, 

tight little isle. 

Soapy straightened the lady missionary's ready-made tie, 

dragged his shrinking cuffs into the open, set his hat at a killing 

cant and sidled toward the young woman. He made eyes at her, 

was taken with sudden coughs and 'hems,' smiled, smirked and 

went brazenly through the impudent and contemptible litany of 

the 'masher.' With half an eye Soapy saw that the policeman was 

watching him fixedly. The young woman moved away a few steps, 

and again bestowed her absorbed attention upon the shaving 

mugs. Soapy followed, boldly stepping to her side, raised his hat 

and said: 

'Ah there, Bedelia! Don't you want to come and play in my 

yard?' 

The policeman was still looking. The persecuted young woman 

had but to beckon a finger and Soapy would be practically en route 

for his insular haven. Already he imagined he could feel the cosy 

warmth of the station-house. The young woman faced him and, 

stretching out a hand, caught Soapy's coat-sleeve. 

'Sure, Mike,' she said joyfully, 'if you'll blow me to a pail of 

suds. I'd have spoke to you sooner, but the cop was watching.' 

With the young woman playing the clinging ivy to his oak 

Soapy walked past the policeman, overcome with gloom. He 

seemed doomed to liberty. 

At the next corner he shook off his companion and ran. He 

halted in the district where by night are found the lightest streets, 

hearts, vows and librettos. Women in furs and men in greatcoats 

moved gaily in the wintry air. A sudden fear seized Soapy that some 

dreadful enchantment had rendered him immune to arrest. The 

thought brought a little of panic upon it, and when he came upon 

another policeman lounging grandly in front of a transplendent 

theatre he caught at the immediate straw of 'disorderly conduct.' 

On the sidewalk Soapy began to yell drunken gibberish at the 

top of his harsh voice. He danced, howled, raved and otherwise 

disturbed the welkin. 

The policeman twirled his club, turned his back to Soapy and 

remarked to a citizen: 

' 'Tis one of them Yale lads celebratin' the goose egg they give 

to the Hartford College. Noisy; but no harm. We've instructions 

to lave them be.' 

36 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

Disconsolate, Soapy ceased his unavailing racket. Would never a 

policeman lay hands on him? In his fancy the Island seemed an 

unattainable Arcadia. He buttoned his thin coat against the chilling 

wind. 

In a cigar store he saw a well-dressed man lighting a cigar at a 

swinging light. His silk umbrella he had set by the door on enter­

ing. 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 improve­

ments. 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 mas­

tery 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 pedes­

trians were few; sparrows twittered sleepily in the eaves - for a 

little while the scene might have been a country churchyard. And 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 37 

the anthem that the organist played cemented Soapy to the iron 

fence, for he had known it well in the days when his life contained 

such things as mothers and roses and ambitions and friends and 

immaculate thoughts and collars. 

The conjunction of Soapy's receptive state of mind and the 

influences about the old church wrought a sudden and wonderful 

change in his soul. He viewed with swift horror the pit into which 

he had tumbled, the degraded days, unworthy desires, dead hopes, 

wrecked faculties and base motives that made up his existence. 

And also in a moment his heart responded thrillingly to this 

novel mood. An instantaneous and strong impulse moved him to 

battle with his desperate fate. He would pull himself out of the 

mire; he would make a man of himself again; he would conquer 

the evil that had taken possession of him. There was time; he was 

comparatively young yet; he would resurrect his old eager ambi­

tions 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 them­

selves in remunerative English, and no magazine goes to press 

nowadays without an animal story in it, except the old-style 

monthlies that are still running pictures of Bryan and the Mont 

Pelée horror. 

But you needn't look for any stuck-up literature in my piece, 

38 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

such as Bearoo, the bear, and Snakoo, the snake, and Tammanoo, 

the tiger, talk in the jungle books. A yellow dog that's spent most 

of his life in a cheap New York flat, sleeping in a corner on an old 

sateen underskirt (the one she spilled port wine on at the Lady 

Longshoremen's banquet), mustn't be expected to perform any 

tricks with the art of speech. 

I was born a yellow pup; date, locality, pedigree and weight 

unknown. The first thing I can recollect, an old woman had me in 

a basket at Broadway and Twenty-third trying to sell me to a 

fat lady. Old Mother Hubbard was boosting me to beat the band 

as a genuine Pomeranian-Hambletonian-Red-Irish-Cochin-ChinaStoke-Pogis fox terrier. The fat lady chased a V around among the 

samples of gros grain flannelette in her shopping-bag till she cor­

nered it, and gave up. From that moment I was a pet - a mamma's 

own wootsey squidlums. Say, gentle reader, did you ever have 

a 200-pound woman breathing a flavour of Camembert cheese 

and Peau d'Espagne pick you up and wallop her nose all over 

you, remarking all the time in an Emma Eames tone of voice: 

'Oh, oo's um oodlum, doodlum, woodlum, toodlum, bitsy-witsy 

skoodlums?' 

From a pedigreed yellow pup I grew up to be an anonymous 

yellow cur looking like a cross between an Angora cat and a box of 

lemons. But my mistress never tumbled. She thought that the two 

primeval pups that Noah chased into the ark were but a collateral 

branch of my ancestors. It took two policemen to keep her from 

entering me at the Madison Square Garden for the Siberian 

bloodhound prize. 

I'll tell you about that flat. The house was the ordinary thing 

in New York, paved with Parian marble in the entrance hall and 

cobblestones above the first floor. Our flat was three fl - well, 

not flights - climbs up. My mistress rented it unfurnished, and 

put in the regular things - 1903 antique upholstered parlour set, 

oil chromo of geishas in a Harlem tea-house, rubber plant and 

husband. 

By Sirius! there was a biped I felt sorry for. He was a little man 

with sandy hair and whiskers a good deal like mine. Hen-pecked? 

- well, toucans and flamingoes and pelicans all had their bills in 

him. He wiped the dishes and listened to my mistress tell about 

the cheap, ragged things the lady with the squirrel-skin coat on 

the second floor hung out on her line to dry. And every evening 

while she was getting supper she made him take me out on the end 

of a string for a walk. 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 39 

If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone 

they'd never marry. Laura Lean Jibbey, peanut brittle, a little 

almond cream on the neck muscles, dishes unwashed, half an 

hour's talk with the iceman, reading a package of old letters, a 

couple of pickles and two bottles of malt extract, one hour peeking 

through a hole in the window shade into the flat across the airshaft - that's about all there is to it. Twenty minutes before time 

for him to come home from work she straightens up the house, 

fixes her rat so it won't show, and gets out a lot of sewing for a 

ten-minute bluff. 

I led a dog's life in that flat. 'Most all day I lay there in my 

corner watching the fat woman kill time. I slept sometimes and 

had pipe dreams about being out chasing cats into basements and 

growling at old ladies with black mittens, as a dog was intended to 

do. Then she would pounce upon me with a lot of that drivelling 

poodle palaver and kiss me on the nose - but what could I do? A 

dog can't chew cloves. 

I began to feel sorry for Hubby, dog my cats if I didn't. We 

looked so much alike that people noticed it when we went out; so 

we shook the streets that Morgan's cab drives down, and took to 

climbing the piles of last December's snow on the streets where 

cheap people live. 

One evening when we were thus promenading, and I was trying 

to look like a prize St. Bernard, and the old man was trying to look 

like he wouldn't have murdered the. first organ-grinder he heard 

play Mendelssohn's wedding-march, I looked up at him and said, 

in my way: 

'What are you looking so sour about, you oakum trimmed lob­

ster? 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 communica­

tion upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction. 

In the flat across the hall from us lived a lady with a black-andtan terrier. Her husband strung it and took it out every evening, 

40 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

but he always came home cheerful and whistling. One day I 

touched noses with the black-and-tan in the hall, and I struck him 

for an elucidation. 

'See, here, Wiggle-and-Skip,' I says, 'you know that it ain't the 

nature of a real man to play dry-nurse to a dog in public. I never 

saw one leashed to a bow-wow yet that didn't look like he'd like to 

lick every other man that looked at him. But your boss comes in 

every day as perky and set up as an amateur prestidigitator doing 

the egg trick. How does he do it? Don't tell me he likes it.' 

'Him?' says the black-and-tan. 'Why, he uses Nature's Own 

Remedy. He gets spifflicated. At first when we go out he's as shy 

as the man on the steamer who would rather play pedro when they 

make 'em all jackpots. By the time we've been in eight saloons he 

don't care whether the thing on the end of his line is a dog or a 

catfish. I've lost two inches of my tail trying to sidestep those 

swinging doors.' 

The pointer I got from that terrier - vaudeville please copy - set 

me to thinking. 

One evening about six o'clock my mistress ordered him to get 

busy and do the ozone act for Lovey. I have concealed it until 

now, but that is what she called me. The black-and-tan was called 

'Tweetness.' I consider that I have the bulge on him as far as you 

could chase a rabbit. Still 'Lovey' is something of a nomenclatural 

tin-can on the tail of one's self-respect. 

At a quiet place on a safe street I tightened the line of my custo­

dian in front of an attractive, refined saloon. I made a dead-ahead 

scramble for the doors, whining like a dog in the press despatches 

that lets the family know that little Alice is bogged while gathering 

lilies in the brook. 

'Why, darn my eyes,' says the old man, with a grin; 'darn my 

eyes if the saffron-coloured son of a seltzer lemonade ain't asking 

me in to take a drink. Lemme see - how long's it been since I saved 

shoe leather by keeping one foot on the footrest? I believe I'll - ' 

I knew I had him. Hot Scotches he took, sitting at a table. For 

an hour he kept the Campbells coming. I sat by his side rapping 

for the waiter with my tail, and eating free lunch such as mamma 

in her flat never equalled with her homemade truck bought at a 

delicatessen store eight minutes before papa comes home. 

When the products of Scotland were all exhausted except the 

rye bread the old man unwound me from the table leg and played 

me outside like a fisherman plays a salmon. Out there he took off 

my collar and threw it into the street. 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 41 

'Poor doggie,' says he; 'good doggie. She shan't kiss you any 

more. ' S a darned shame. Good doggie, go away and get run over 

by a street car and be happy.' 

I refused to leave. I leaped and frisked around the old man's legs 

happy as a pug on a rug. 

'You old flea-headed woodchuck-chaser,' I said to him - 'you 

moon-baying, rabbit-pointing, egg-stealing old beagle, can't you 

see that I don't want to leave you? Can't you see that we're both 

Pups in the Wood and the missis is the cruel uncle after you with 

the dish towel and me with the flea liniment and a pink bow to tie 

on my tail. Why not cut that all out and be pards for evermore?' 

Maybe you'll say he didn't understand - maybe he didn't. But 

he kind of got a grip on the Hot Scotches, and stood still for a 

minute, thinking. 

'Doggie,' says he finally, 'we don't live more than a dozen lives 

on this earth, and very few of us live to be more than 300. If I ever 

see that flat any more I'm a flat, and if you do you're flatter; and 

that's no flattery. I'm offering 60 to 1 that Westward Ho wins out 

by the length of a dachshund.' 

There was no string, but I frolicked along with my master to the 

Twenty-third Street ferry. And the cats on the route saw reason to 

give thanks that prehensile claws had been given them. 

On the Jersey side my master said to a stranger who stood 

eating a currant bun: 

'Me and my doggie, we are bound for the Rocky Mountains.' 

But what pleased me most was when my old man pulled both of 

my ears until I howled, and said: 

'You common, monkey-headed, rat-tailed, sulphur-coloured 

son of a door-mat, do you know what I'm going to call you?' 

I thought of 'Lovey,' and I whined dolefully. 

'I'm going to call you "Pete," ' says my master; and if I'd had 

five tails I couldn't have done enough wagging to do justice to the 

occasion. 

IX 

The Love-philtre of Ikey Schoenstein 

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

and First Avenue, where the distance between the two streets is the 

shortest. The Blue Light does not consider that pharmacy is a thing 

42 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

of bric-a-brac, scent and ice-cream soda. If you ask it for a pain-killer 

it will not give you a bonbon. 

The Blue Light scorns the labour-saving arts of modern phar­

macy. It macerates its opium and percolates its own laudanum and 

paregoric. To this day pills are made behind its tall prescription 

desk - pills rolled out on its own pill-tile, divided with a spatula, 

rolled with the finger and thumb, dusted with calcined magnesia 

and delivered in little round, pasteboard pill-boxes. The store is on 

a corner about which coveys of ragged-plumed, hilarious children 

play and become candidates for the cough-drops and soothing 

syrups that wait for them inside. 

Ikey Schoenstein was the night clerk of the Blue Light and the 

friend of his customers. Thus it is on the East Side, where the 

heart of pharmacy is not glacé. There, as it should be, the druggist 

is a counsellor, a confessor, an adviser, an able and willing mis­

sionary 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, bespecta­

cled 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 circumlocu­

tion 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 dispen­

satory contained nothing equal to her. But Ikey was timid, and his 

hopes remained insoluble in the menstruum of his backwardness 

and fears. Behind his counter he was a superior being, calmly 

conscious of special knowledge and worth; outside, he was a 

weak-kneed, purblind, motorman-cursed rambler, with ill-fitting 

clothes stained with chemicals and smelling of socotrine aloes and 

valerianate of ammonia. 

The fly in Ikey's ointment (thrice welcome, pat trope!) was 

Chunk McGowan. 

Mr. McGowan was also striving to catch the bright smiles 

tossed about by Rosy. But he was no out-fielder as Ikey was; he 

picked them off the bat. At the same time he was Ikey's friend and 

customer, and often dropped in at the Blue Light Drug Store to 

have a bruise painted with iodine or get a cut rubber-plastered 

after a pleasant evening spent along the Bowery. 

One afternoon McGowan drifted in in his silent, easy way, and 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 43 

sat, comely, smoothed-faced, hard, indomitable, good-natured, 

upon a stool. 

'Ikey,' said he, when his friend had fetched his mortar and sat 

opposite, grinding gum benzoin to a powder, 'get busy with your 

ear. It's drugs for me if you've got the line I need.' 

Ikey scanned the countenance of Mr. McGowan for the usual 

evidences of conflict, but found none. 

'Take your coat off,' he ordered. 'I guess already that you have 

been stuck in the ribs with a knife. I have many times told you 

those Dagoes would do you up.' 

Mr. McGowan smiled. 'Not them,' he said. 'Not any Dagoes. 

But you've located the diagnosis all right enough - it's under my 

coat, near the ribs. Say! Ikey - Rosy and me are goin' to run away 

and get married to-night.' 

Ikey's left forefinger was doubled over the edge of the mortar, 

holding it steady. He gave it a wild rap with the pestle, but felt 

it not. Meanwhile Mr. McGowan's smile faded to a look of 

perplexed gloom. 

'That is,' he continued, 'if she keeps in the notion until the time 

comes. We've been layin' pipes for the gateway for two weeks. 

One day she says she will; the same evenin' she says nixy. We've 

agreed on to-night, and Rosy's stuck to the affirmative this time 

for two whole days. But it's five hours yet till the time, and I'm 

afraid she'll stand me up when it comes to the scratch.' 

'You said you wanted drugs,' remarked Ikey. 

Mr. McGowan looked ill at ease and harassed - a condition 

opposed to his usual line of demeanour. He made a patent-medi­

cine almanac into a roll and fitted it with unprofitable carefulness 

about his finger. 

'I wouldn't have this double handicap make a false start to-night 

for a million,' he said. 'I've got a little flat up in Harlem all ready, 

with chrysanthemums on the table and a kettle ready to boil. And 

I've engaged a pulpit pounder to be ready at his house for us at 

9.30. It's got to come off. And if Rosy don't change her mind 

again!' - Mr. McGowan ceased, a prey to his doubts. 

'I don't see then yet,' said Ikey shortly, 'what makes it that you 

talk of drugs, or what I can be doing about it.' 

'Old man Riddle don't like me a little bit,' went on the uneasy 

suitor, bent upon marshalling his arguments. 'For a week he hasn't 

let Rosy step outside the door with me. If it wasn't for losin' a 

boarder they'd have bounced me long ago. I'm makin' $20 a week 

and she'll never regret flyin' the coop with Chunk McGowan.' 

44 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

'You will excuse me, Chunk,' said Ikey. 'I must make a prescription 

that is to be called for soon.' 

'Say,' said McGowan, looking up suddenly, 'say, Ikey, ain't 

there a drug of some kind - some kind of powders that'll make a 

girl like you better if you give 'em to her?' 

Ikey's lip beneath his nose curled with the scorn of superior 

enlightenment; but before he could answer, McGowan continued: 

'Tim Lacy told me once that he got some from a croaker up­

town 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 pharma­

ceutists must have much carefulness. To you alone of my acquain­

tance would I entrust a powder like that. But for you I shall make 

it, and you shall see how it makes Rosy to think of you.' 

Ikey went behind the prescription desk. There he crushed to a 

powder two soluble tablets, each containing a quarter of a grain of 

morphia. To them he added a little sugar of milk to increase the 

bulk, and folded the mixture neatly in a white paper. Taken by an 

adult this powder would ensure several hours of heavy slumber 

without danger to the sleeper. This he handed to Chunk 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 45 

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

received the hearty thanks of the backyard Lochinvar. 

The subtlety of Ikey's action becomes apparent upon recital of 

his subsequent move. He sent a messenger for Mr. Riddle and dis­

closed 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 back­

yard 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 9.30

 1/4

. She's up at the flat - she cooked eggs this 

mornin' in a blue kimono - Lord! how lucky I am! You must pace 

up some day, Ikey, and feed with us. I've got a job down near the 

bridge, and that's where I'm heading for now.' 

'The - the powder?' stammered Ikey. 

'Oh, that stuff you gave me!' said Chunk broadening his grin; 

'well, it was this way. I sat down at the supper table last night at 

Riddle's, and I looked at Rosy, and I says to myself, "Chunk, if you 

get the girl get her on the square - don't try any hocus-pocus with 

a thoroughbred like her." And I keeps the paper you give me in 

my pocket. And then my lamps falls on another party present, 

who, I says to myself, is failin' in a proper affection toward his 

comin' son-in-law, so I watches my chance and dumps that 

powder in old man Riddle's coffee - see?' 

74 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

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

was her own, and hers only. 

The odour brought her vividly, almost tangibly before him. The 

world of finance dwindled suddenly to a speck. And she was in the 

next room - twenty steps away. 

'By George, I'll do it now,' said Maxwell, half aloud. 'I'll ask her 

now. I wonder I didn't do it long ago.' 

He dashed into the inner office with the haste of a short trying 

to cover. He charged upon the desk of the stenographer. 

She looked up at him with a smile. A soft pink crept over her 

cheek, and her eyes were kind and frank. Maxwell leaned one 

elbow on her desk. He still clutched fluttering papers with both 

hands and the pen was above his ear. 

'Miss Leslie,' he began hurriedly, 'I have but a moment to spare. 

I want to say something in that moment. Will you be my wife? I 

haven't had time to make love to you in the ordinary way, but I 

really do love you. Talk quick, please - those fellows are clubbing 

the stuffing out of Union Pacific' 

'Oh, what are you talking about?' exclaimed the young lady. She 

rose to her feet and gazed upon him, round-eyed. 

'Don't you understand?' said Maxwell restively. 'I want you to 

marry me. I love you, Miss Leslie. I wanted to tell you, and I 

snatched a minute when things had slackened up a bit. They're 

calling me for the 'phone now. Tell 'em to wait a minute, Pitcher. 

Won't you, Miss Leslie?' 

The stenographer acted very queerly. At first she seemed over­

come with amazement; then tears flowed from her wondering 

eyes; and then she smiled sunnily through them, and one of her 

arms slid tenderly about the broker's neck. 

'I know now,' she said softly. 'It's this old business that has 

driven everything else out of your head for the time. I was fright­

ened at first. Don't you remember, Harvey? We were married 

last evening at eight o'clock in the Little Church Around the 

Corner.' 

XVI 

The Furnished Room 

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

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

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 75 

Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished 

room to furnished room, transients for ever - transients in abode, 

transients in heart and mind. They sing 'Home Sweet Home' in 

ragtime; they carry their lares et penates in a bandbox; their vine is 

entwined about a picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree. 

Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand 

dwellers, should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no 

doubt; but it would be strange if there could not be found a ghost 

or two in the wake of all these vagrant ghosts. 

One evening after dark a young man prowled among these 

crumbling red mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth he 

rested his lean hand-baggage upon the step and wiped the dust 

from his hat-band and forehead. The bell sounded faint and far 

away in some remote, hollow depths. 

To the door of this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung, 

came a housekeeper who made him think of an unwholesome, sur­

feited 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 for­

sworn. It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated 

in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew 

in patches to the staircase and was viscid under the foot like 

organic matter. At each turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the 

wall. Perhaps plants had once been set within them. If so they had 

died in that foul and tainted air. It may be that statues of the saints 

had stood there, but it was not difficult to conceive that imps and 

devils had dragged them forth in the darkness and down to the 

unholy depths of some furnished pit below. 

'This is the room,' said the housekeeper, from her furry throat. 

'It's a nice room. It ain't often vacant. I had some most elegant 

people in it last summer - no trouble at all, and paid in advance to 

the minute. The water's at the end of the hall. Sprowls and 

Mooney-kept it three months. They done a vaudeville sketch. 

Miss B'retta Sprowls - you may have heard of her - Oh, that was 

just the stage names - right there over the dresser is where the 

marriage certificate hung, framed. The gas is here, and you see 

76 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

there is plenty of closet room. It's a room everybody likes. It never 

stays idle long.' 

'Do you have many theatrical people rooming here?' asked the 

young man. 

'They comes and goes. A good proportion of my lodgers is con­

nected with the theatres. Yes, sir, this is the theatrical district. 

Actor people never stays long anywhere. I get my share. Yes, they 

comes and they goes.' 

He engaged the room, paying for a week in advance. He was 

tired, he said, and would take possession at once. He counted out 

the money. The room had been made ready, she said, even to 

towels and water. As the housekeeper moved away he put, for the 

thousandth time, the question that he carried at the end of his 

tongue. 

'A young girl - Miss Vashner - Miss Eloise Vashner - do you 

remember such a one among your lodgers? She would be singing 

on the stage, most likely. A fair girl, of medium height and slender, 

with reddish gold hair and a dark mole near her left eyebrow.' 

'No, I don't remember the name. Them stage people has names 

they change as often as their rooms. They comes and they goes. 

No, I don't call that one to mind.' 

No. Always no. Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the 

inevitable negative. So much time spent by day in questioning 

managers, agents, schools and choruses; by night among the audi­

ences 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 disap­

pearance from home this great water-girt city held her some­

where, 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, con­

fused in speech as though it were an apartment in Babel, tried to 

discourse to him of its divers tenantry. 

A polychromatic rug like some brilliant-flowered, rectangular, 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 77 

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

Upon the gay-papered wall were those pictures that pursue the 

homeless one from house to house - The Huguenot Lovers, The 

First Quarrel, The Wedding Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. 

The mantel's chastely severe outline was ingloriously veiled behind 

some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew like the sashes of the Ama­

zonian 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 for­

bearance by its garish coldness - and wreaked upon it their pas­

sions. The furniture was chipped and bruised; the couch, distorted 

by bursting springs, seemed a horrible monster that had been slain 

during the stress of some grotesque convulsion. Some more 

potent upheaval had cloven a great slice from the marble mantel. 

Each plank in the floor owned its particular cant and shriek as 

from a separate and individual agony. It seemed incredible that all 

this malice and injury had been wrought upon the room by those 

who had called it for a time their home; and yet it may have been 

the cheated home instinct surviving blindly, the resentful rage at 

false household gods that had kindled their wrath. A hut that is 

our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish. 

The young tenant in the chair allowed these thoughts to file, 

soft-shod, through his mind, while there drifted into the room 

furnished sounds and furnished scents. He heard in one room a 

tittering and incontinent, slack laughter; in others the monologue 

of a scold, the rattling of dice, a lullaby, and one crying dully; 

above him a banjo tinkled with spirit. Doors banged somewhere; 

the elevated trains roared intermittently; a cat yowled miserably 

upon a back fence. And he breathed the breath of the house - a 

dank savour rather than a smell - a cold, musty effluvium as from 

78 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

underground vaults mingled with the reeking exhalations of 

linoleum and mildewed and rotten woodwork. 

Then, suddenly, as he rested there, the room was filled with the 

strong, sweet odour of mignonette. It came as upon a single buffet 

of wind with such sureness and fragrance and emphasis that it 

almost seemed a living visitant. And the man cried aloud, 'What, 

dear?' as if he had been called, and sprang up and faced about. The 

rich odour clung to him and wrapped him about. He reached out 

his arms for it, all his senses for the time confused and commin­

gled. 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, infi­

nite 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 feminin­

ity'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 mat­

ting on his hands and knees, rummaging mantel and tables, the 

curtains and hangings, the drunken cabinet in the corner, for a vis­

ible sign unable to perceive that she was there beside, around, 

against, within, above him, clinging to him, wooing him, calling 

him so poignantly through the finer senses that even his grosser 

ones became cognizant of the call. Once again he answered loudly, 

'Yes, dear!' and turned, wild-eyed, to gaze on vacancy, for he 

could not yet discern form and colour and love and outstretched 

arms in the odour of mignonette. Oh, God! whence that odour, 

and since when have odours had a voice to call? Thus he groped. 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 79 

He burrowed in crevices and corners, and found corks and ciga­

rettes. These he passed in passive contempt. But once he found in 

a fold of the matting a half-smoked cigar, and this he ground 

beneath his heel with a green and trenchant oath. He sifted the 

room from end to end. He found dreary and ignoble small records 

of many a peripatetic tenant; but of her whom he sought, and who 

may have lodged there, and whose spirit seemed to hover there, he 

found no trace. 

And then he thought of the housekeeper. 

He ran from the haunted room downstairs and to a door that 

showed a crack of light. She came out to his knock. He smothered 

his excitement as best he could. 

'Will you tell me, madam,' he besought her, 'who occupied the 

room I have before I came?' 

'Yes, sir. I can tell you again. 'Twas Sprowls and Mooney, as I 

said. Miss B'retta Sprowls it was in the theatres, but Missis 

Mooney she was. My house is well known for respectability. The 

marriage certificate hung, framed, on a nail over - ' 

'What kind of a lady was Miss Sprowls - in looks, I mean?' 

'Why, black-haired, sir, short and stout, with a comical face. 

They left a week ago Tuesday.' 

'And before they occupied it?' 

'Why, there was a single gentleman connected with the draying 

business. He left owing me a week. Before him was Missis Crowder 

and her two children, that stayed four months; and back of them 

was old Mr. Doyle, whose sons paid for him. He kept the room six 

months. That goes back a year, sir, and further I do not remember.' 

He thanked her and crept back to his room. The room was 

dead. The essence that had vivified it was gone. The perfume of 

mignonette had departed. In its place was the old, stale odour of 

mouldy house furniture, of atmosphere in storage. 

The ebbing of his hope drained his faith. He sat staring at the 

yellow, singing gaslight. Soon he walked to the bed and began to 

tear the sheets into strips. With the blade of his knife he drove 

them tightly into every crevice around windows and door. When 

all was snug and taut he turned out the light, turned the gas full on 

again and laid himself gratefully upon the bed. 

• • • • • 

It was Mrs. McCool's night to go with the can for beer. So she 

fetched it and sat with Mrs. Purdy in one of those subterranean 

80 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

retreats where housekeepers foregather and the worm dieth 

seldom. 

'I rented out my third floor back, this evening,' said Mrs. Purdy, 

across a fine circle of foam. 'A young man took it. He went up to 

bed two hours ago. 

'Now, did ye, Mrs. Purdy, ma'am?' said Mrs. McCool, with 

intense admiration. 'You do be a wonder for rentin' rooms of that 

kind. And did ye tell him, then?' she concluded in a husky whisper, 

laden with mystery. 

'Rooms,' said Mrs. Purdy, in her furriest tones, 'are furnished 

for to rent. I did not tell him, Mrs. McCool.' 

' 'Tis right ye are, ma'am; 'tis by renting rooms we kape alive. 

Ye have the rale sense for business, ma'am. There be many people 

will rayjict the rentin' of a room if they be tould a suicide has been 

after dyin' in the bed of it.' 

'As you say, we has our living to be making,' remarked Mrs, 

Purdy. 

'Yis, ma'am; 'tis true. 'Tis just one wake ago this day I helped ye 

lay out the third floor back. A pretty slip of a colleen she was to be 

killin' herself wid the gas a swate little face she had, Mrs. Purdy, 

ma'am.' 

'She'd a-been called handsome, as you say,' said Mrs. Purdy, 

assenting but critical, 'but for that mole she had a-growin' by her 

left eyebrow. Do fill up your glass again, Mrs. McCool.' 

XVII 

The Brief Debut of Tildy 

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

rant it is your loss. For if you are one of the fortunate ones who 

dine expensively you should be interested to know how the other 

half consumes provisions. And if you belong to the half to whom 

waiters' checks are things of moment, you should know Bogle's, 

for there you get your money's worth - in quantity, at least. 

Bogle's is situated in that highway of bourgeoisie, that boulevard 

of Brown-Jones-and-Robinson, Eighth Avenue. There are two 

rows of tables in the room, six in each row. On each table is a 

castor-stand, containing cruets of condiments and seasons. From 

the pepper cruet you may shake a cloud of something tasteless 

and melancholy, like volcanic dust. From the salt cruet you may 

178 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

'A very sad one,' says he, laying the points of his manicured fin­

gers together. 'An utterly incorrigible girl. I am Special Terrestrial 

Officer the Reverend Jones. The case was assigned to me. The girl 

murdered her fiancé and committed suicide. She had no defence. 

My report to the court relates the facts in detail, all of which are 

substantiated by reliable witnesses. The wages of sin is death. 

Praise the Lord.' 

The court officer opened the door and stepped out. 

'Poor girl,' said Special Terrestrial Officer the Reverend Jones, 

with a tear in his eye. 'It was one of the saddest cases that I ever 

met with. Of course she was - ' 

'Discharged,' said the court officer. 'Come here, Jonesy. First 

thing you know you'll be switched to the pot-pie squad. How 

would you like to be on the missionary force in the South Sea 

Islands - hey? Now, you quit making these false arrests, or you'll 

be transferred - see? The guilty party you've got to look for in this 

case is a red-haired, unshaven, untidy man, sitting by the window 

reading, in his stocking feet, while his children play in the streets. 

Get a move on you.' 

Now, wasn't that a silly dream? 

XXXIII 

The Last Leaf 

IN A LITTLE DISTRICT west of Washington Square the streets have 

run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called 'places.' 

These 'places' make strange angles and curves. One street crosses 

itself a time or two. An artist once discovered a valuable possibility 

in this street. Suppose a collector with a bill for paints, paper and 

canvas should, in traversing this route, suddenly meet himself 

coming back, without a cent having been paid on account! 

So, to quaint old Greenwich Village the art people soon came 

prowling, hunting for north windows and eighteenth-century 

gables and Dutch attics and low rents. Then they imported some 

pewter mugs and a chafing dish or two from Sixth Avenue, and 

became a 'colony.' 

At the top of a squatty, three-story brick Sue and Johnsy had 

their studio. 'Johnsy' was familiar for Joanna. One was from 

Maine, the other from California. They had met at the table 

d'hôte of an Eighth Street 'Delmonico's,' and found their tastes in 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 1 79 

art, chicory salad and bishop sleeves so congenial that the joint 

studio resulted. 

That was in May. In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom 

the doctors called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony, touching 

one here and there with his icy finger. Over on the East Side this 

ravager strode boldly, smiting his victims by scores, but his feet 

trod slowly through the maze of the narrow and moss-grown 

'places.' 

Mr. Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric old gentleman. A mite of a little woman with blood thinned by Californian zephyrs was hardly fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed 

old duffer. But Johnsy he smote; and she lay, scarcely moving, on 

her painted iron bedstead, looking through the small Dutch 

window-panes at the blank side of the next brick house. 

One morning the busy doctor invited Sue into the hallway with 

a shaggy, grey eyebrow. 

'She has one chance in - let us say, ten,' he said, as he shook 

down the mercury in his clinical thermometer. 'And that chance is 

for her to want to live. This way people have of lining-up on the 

side of the undertaker makes the entire pharmacopÅ“ia look silly. 

Your little lady has made up her mind that she's not going to get 

well. Has she anything on her mind?' 

'She - she wanted to paint the Bay of Naples some day,' said 

Sue. 

'Paint? - bosh! Has she anything on her mind worth thinking 

about twice - a man, for instance?' 

'A man?' said Sue, with a jews'-harp twang in her voice. 'Is a 

man worth - but, no, doctor; there is nothing of the kind.' 

'Well, it is the weakness, then,' said the doctor. 'I will do all that 

science, so far as it may filter through my efforts, can accomplish. 

But whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her 

funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power 

of medicines. If you will get her to ask one question about the new 

winter styles in cloak sleeves I will promise you a one-in-five 

chance for her, instead of one in ten.' 

After the doctor had gone, Sue went into the workroom and 

cried a Japanese napkin to a pulp. Then she swaggered into 

Johnsy's room with her drawing-board, whistling ragtime. 

Johnsy lay, scarcely making a ripple under the bedclothes, with 

her face toward the window. Sue stopped whistling, thinking she 

was asleep. 

She arranged her board and began a pen-and-ink drawing to 

180 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

illustrate a magazine story. Young artists must pave their way to 

Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors 

write to pave their way to Literature. 

As Sue was sketching a pair of elegant horseshow riding trousers 

and a monocle on the figure of the hero, an Idaho cowboy, she 

heard a low sound, several times repeated. She went quickly to the 

bedside. 

Johnsy's eyes were open wide. She was looking out the window 

and counting - counting backward. 

'Twelve,' she said, and a little later, 'eleven'; and then 'ten,' and 

'nine'; and then 'eight' and 'seven,' almost together. 

Sue looked solicitously out the window. What was there to 

count? There was only a bare, dreary yard to be seen, and the 

blank side of the brick house twenty feet away. An old, old ivy 

vine, gnarled and decayed at the roots, climbed half-way up the 

brick wall. The cold breath of autumn had stricken its leaves from 

the vine until its skeleton branches clung, almost bare, to the 

crumbling bricks. 

'What is it, dear?' asked Sue. 

'Six,' said Johnsy, in almost a whisper. 'They're falling faster 

now. Three days ago there were almost a hundred. It made my 

head ache to count them. But now it's easy. There goes another 

one. There are only five left now.' 

'Five what, dear? Tell your Sudie.' 

'Leaves. On the ivy vine. When the last one falls I must go too. 

I've known that for three days. Didn't the doctor tell you?' 

'Oh, I never heard of such nonsense,' complained Sue, with 

magnificent scorn. 'What have old ivy leaves to do with your get­

ting well? And you used to love that vine so, you naughty girl. 

Don't be a goosey. Why, the doctor told me this morning that 

your chances for getting well real soon were - let's see exactly 

what he said - he said the chances were ten to one! Why, that's 

almost as good a chance as we have in New York when we ride on 

the street-cars or walk past a new building. Try to take some broth 

now, and let Sudie go back to her drawing, so she can sell the 

editor man with it, and buy port wine for her sick child, and porkchops for her greedy self.' 

'You needn't get any more wine,' said Johnsy, keeping her eyes 

fixed out the window. 

'There goes another. No, I don't want any broth. That leaves 

just four. I want to see the last one fall before it gets dark. Then 

I'll go too.' 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 181 

'Johnsy, dear,' said Sue, bending over her, 'will you promise me 

to keep your eyes closed, and not look out of the window until I 

am done working? I must hand those drawings in by to-morrow. I 

need the light or I would draw the shade down.' 

'Couldn't you draw in the other room?' asked Johnsy coldly. 

'I'd rather be here by you,' said Sue. 'Besides, I don't want you 

to keep looking at those silly ivy leaves.' 

'Tell me as soon as you have finished,' said Johnsy, closing her 

eyes, and lying white and still as a fallen statue, 'because I want to 

see the last one fall. I'm tired of waiting. I'm tired of thinking. I 

want to turn loose my hold on everything, and go sailing down, 

down, just like one of those poor, tired leaves.' 

'Try to sleep,' said Sue. 'I must call Behrman up to be my model 

for the old hermit miner. I'll not be gone a minute. Don't try to 

move till I come back.' 

Old Behrman was a painter who lived on the ground floor 

beneath them. He was past sixty and had a Michael Angelo's Moses 

beard curling down from the head of a satyr along the body of an 

imp. Behrman was a failure in art. Forty years he had wielded the 

brush without getting near enough to touch the hem of his Mis­

tress's robe. He had been always about to paint a masterpiece, but 

had never yet begun it. For several years he had painted nothing 

except now and then a daub in the line of commerce or advertising. 

He earned a little by serving as a model to those young artists in 

the colony who could not pay the price of a professional. He drank 

gin to excess, and still talked of his coming masterpiece. For the 

rest he was a fierce little old man, who scoffed terribly at softness in 

anyone, and who regarded himself as especial mastiff-in-waiting to 

protect the two young artists in the studio above. 

Sue found Behrman smelling strongly of juniper berries in his 

dimly-lighted den below. In one corner was a blank canvas on an 

easel that had been waiting there for twenty-five years to receive 

the first line of the masterpiece. She told him of Johnsy's fancy, and 

how she feared she would, indeed, light and fragile as a leaf herself, 

float away when her slight hold upon the world grew weaker. 

Old Behrman, with his red eyes plainly streaming, shouted his 

contempt and derision for such idiotic imaginings. 

'Vass!' he cried. 'Is dere people in de world mit der foolishness 

to die because leafs dey drop off from a confounded vine? I haf not 

heard of such a thing. No, I vill not bose as a model for your fool 

hermit-dunderhead. Vy do you allow dot silly pusiness to come in 

der prain of her? Ach, dot poor little Miss Yohnsy.' 

182 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

'She is very ill arid weak,' said Sue, 'and the fever has left her 

mind morbid and full of strange fancies. Very well, Mr. Behrman, 

if you do not care to pose for me, you needn't. But I think you are 

a horrid old - old flibberti-gibbet.' 

'You are just like a woman!' yelled Behrman. 'Who said I vill 

not bose? Go on. I come mit you. For half an hour I haf peen 

trying to say dot I am ready to bose. Gott! dis is not any blace in 

which one so goot as Miss Yohnsy shall lie sick. Some day I vill 

baint a masterpiece, and ve shall all go avay. Gott! yes.' 

Johnsy was sleeping when they went upstairs. Sue pulled the 

shade down to the window-sill and motioned Behrman into the 

other room. In there they peered out the window fearfully at the 

ivy vine. Then they looked at each other for a moment without 

speaking. A persistent, cold rain was falling, mingled with snow. 

Behrman, in his old blue shirt, took his seat as the hermit-miner 

on an upturned kettle for a rock. 

When Sue awoke from an hour's sleep the next morning she 

found Johnsy with dull, wide-open eyes staring at the drawn green 

shade. 

'Pull it up! I want to see,' she ordered, in a whisper. 

Wearily Sue obeyed. 

But, lo! after the beating rain and fierce gusts of wind that had 

endured through the livelong night, there yet stood out against 

the brick wall one ivy leaf. It was the last on the vine. Still dark 

green near its stem, but with its serrated edges tinted with the 

yellow of dissolution and decay, it hung bravely from a branch 

some twenty feet above the ground. 

'It is the last one,' said Johnsy. 'I thought it would surely fall 

during the night. I heard the wind. It will fall to-day, and I shall 

die at the same time.' 

'Dear, dear!' said Sue, leaning her worn face down to the pillow; 

'think of me, if you won't think of yourself. What would I do?' 

But Johnsy did not answer. The lonesomest thing in all the 

world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, 

far journey. The fancy seemed to possess her more strongly as 

one by one the ties that bound her to friendship and to earth were 

loosed. 

The day wore away, and even through the twilight they could 

see the lone ivy leaf clinging to its stem against the wall. And then, 

with the coming of the night the north wind was again loosed, 

while the rain still beat against the windows and pattered down 

from the low Dutch eaves. 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 183 

When it was light enough Johnsy, the merciless, commanded 

that the shade be raised. 

The ivy leaf was still there. 

Johnsy lay for a long time looking at it. And then she called to 

Sue, who was stirring her chicken broth over the gas stove. 

'I've been a bad girl, Sudie,' said Johnsy. 'Something has made 

that last leaf stay there to show me how wicked I was. It is a sin to 

want to die. You may bring me a little broth now, and some milk 

with a little port in it, and - no; bring me a hand-mirror first; and 

then pack some pillows about me, and I will sit up and watch you 

cook.' 

An hour later she said -

'Sudie, some day I hope to paint the Bay of Naples.' 

The doctor came in the afternoon, and Sue had an excuse to go 

into the hallway as he left. 

'Even chances,' said the doctor, talking Sue's thin, shaking hand 

in his. 'With good nursing you'll win. And now I must see another 

case I have downstairs. Behrman, his name is -- some kind of an 

artist, I believe. Pneumonia, too. He is an old, weak man, and the 

attack is acute. There is no hope for him; but he goes to the hospital 

to-day to be made more comfortable.' 

The next day the doctor said to Sue: 'She's out of danger. 

You've won. Nutrition and care now - that's all.' 

And that afternoon Sue came to the bed where Johnsy lay, con­

tentedly knitting a very blue and very useless woollen shoulder 

scarf, and put one arm around her, pillows and all. 

'I have something to tell you, white mouse,' she said. 'Mr. 

Behrman died of pneumonia today in hospital. He was ill only two 

days. The janitor found him on the morning of the first day in his 

room downstairs helpless with pain. His shoes and clothing were 

wet through and icy cold. They couldn't imagine where he had 

been on such a dreadful night. And then they found a lantern, still 

lighted, and a ladder that had been dragged from its place, and some 

scattered brushes, and a palette with green and yellow colours 

mixed on it, and - look out the window, dear, at the last ivy leaf on 

the wall. Didn't you wonder why it never fluttered or moved when 

the wind blew? Ah, darling, it's Behrman's masterpiece - he painted 

it there the night that the last leaf fell.' 

286 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

Presently Thomas moved tentatively in his seat, and thoughtfully 

felt an abrasion or two on his knees and elbows. 

'Say, Annie,' said he confidentially, 'maybe it's one of the last 

dreams of the booze, but I've a kind of a recollection of riding in an 

automobile with a swell guy that took me to a house full of eagles 

and arc lights. He fed me on biscuits and hot air, and then kicked 

me down the front steps. If it was the d t's, why am I so sore?' 

'Shut up, you fool,' said Annie. 

'If I could find that funny guy's house,' said Thomas, in conclusion, 

'I'd go up there some day and punch his nose for him.' 

XLVII 

The Poet and the Peasant 

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 car­

ried on with a waiter. Conant signed this poem, and we sent it to 

the same editor. 

But this has very little to do with the story. 

Just as the editor was reading the first line of the poem, on the 

next morning, a being stumbled off the West Shore ferryboat, and 

loped slowly up Forty-second Street. 

The invader was a young man with light blue eyes, a hanging 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 2 87 

lip, and hair the exact colour of the little orphan's (afterward dis­

covered to be the earl's daughter) in one of Mr. Blaney's plays. His 

trousers were corduroy, his coat short-sleeved, with buttons in the 

middle of his back. One bootleg was outside the corduroys. You 

looked expectantly, though in vain, at his straw hat for ear-holes, 

its shape inaugurating the suspicion that it had been ravaged from 

a former equine possessor. In his hand was a valise - description of 

it is an impossible task; a Boston man would not have carried his 

lunch and law books to his office in it. And above one ear, in his 

hair, was a wisp of hay - the rustic's letter of credit, his badge of 

innocence, the last clinging touch of the Garden of Eden lingering 

to shame the goldbrick men. 

Knowingly, smilingly, the city crowds passed him by. They saw 

the raw stranger stand in the gutter and stretch his neck at the tall 

buildings. At this they ceased to smile, and even to look at him. It 

had been done so often. A few glanced at the antique valise to see 

what Coney 'attraction' or brand of chewing-gum he might be 

thus dinning into his memory. But for the most part he was 

ignored. Even the newsboys looked bored when he scampered like 

a circus clown out of the way of cabs and street-cars. 

At Eighth Avenue stood 'Bunco Harry,' with his dyed mous­

tache and shiny, good-natured eyes. Harry was too good an artist 

not to be pained at the sight of an actor overdoing his part. He 

edged up to the countryman, who had stopped to open his mouth 

at a jewellery store window, and shook his head. 

'Too thick, pal,' he said critically - 'too thick by a couple of 

inches. I don't know what your lay is; but you've got the properties 

on too thick. That hay, now - why, they don't even allow that on 

Proctor's circuit any more.' 

'I don't understand you, mister,' said the green one. 'I'm not 

lookin' for any circus. I've just run down from Ulster County to 

look at the town, bein' that the hayin's over with. Gosh! but it's a 

whopper. I thought Poughkeepsie was some punkins; but this here 

town is five times as big.' 

'Oh, well,' said 'Bunco Harry,' raising his eyebrows, 'I didn't 

mean to butt in. You don't have to tell. I thought you ought to 

tone down a little, so I tried to put you wise. Wish you success at 

your graft, whatever it is. Come and have a drink, anyhow.' 

'I wouldn't mind having a glass of lager beer,' acknowledged the 

other. 

They went to a café frequented by men with smooth faces and 

shifty eyes, and sat at their drinks. 

288 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

'I'm glad I come across you, mister,' said Haylocks. 'How'd you 

like to play a game or two of seven-up? I've got the keerds.' 

He fished them out of Noah's valise - a rare, inimitable deck, 

greasy with bacon suppers and grimy with the soil of cornfields. 

'Bunco Harry' laughed loud and briefly. 

'Not for me, sport,' he said firmly. 'I don't go against that 

make-up of yours for a cent. But I still say you've overdone it. The 

Reubs haven't dressed like that since '79. I doubt if you could 

work Brooklyn for a key-winding watch with that lay-out.' 

'Oh, you needn't think I ain't got the money,' boasted Haylocks. He drew forth a tightly rolled mass or bills as large as a 

teacup, and laid it on the table. 

'Got that for my share of grandmother's farm,' he announced. 

'There's $950 in that roll. Thought I'd come into the city and 

look around for a likely business to go into.' 

'Bunco Harry' took up the roll of money and looked at it with 

almost respect in his smiling eyes. 

'I've seen worse,' he said critically. 'But you'll never do it in 

them clothes. You want to get light tan shoes and a black suit and 

a straw hat with a coloured band, and talk a good deal about Pitts­

burg 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 exagger­

ated rusticity became apparent their expressions changed to wary 

suspicion. 

Haylocks swung his valise across the bar. 

'Keep that awhile for me, mister,' he said, chewing at the end of 

a virulent claybank cigar. 'I'll be back after I knock around a spell. 

And keep your eye on it, for there's $950 inside of it, though 

maybe you wouldn't think so to look at me.' 

Somewhere outside a phonograph struck up a band piece, and 

Haylocks was off for it, his coat-tail buttons flopping in the middle 

of his back. 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 289 

'Divvy? Mike,' said the men hanging upon the bar, winking 

openly at one another. 

'Honest, now,' said the bartender, kicking the valise to one side. 

'You don't think I'd fall to that, do you? Anybody can see he ain't 

no jay. One of McAdoo's come-on squad, I guess. He's a shine if 

he made himself up. There ain't no parts of the country now 

where they dress like that since they run rural free delivery to 

Providence, Rhode Island. If he's got nine-fifty in that valise it's a 

ninety-eight-cent Waterbury that's stopped at ten minutes to ten.' 

When Haylocks had exhausted the resources of Mr. Edison to 

amuse he returned for his valise. And then down Broadway he gal­

livanted, 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 suspi­

cion. And the wisp of hay in his hair was so genuine, so fresh and 

redolent of the meadows, so clamorously rural, that even a shellgame man would have put up his peas and folded his table at the 

sight of it. 

Haylocks seated himself upon a flight of stone steps and once 

more exhumed his roll of yellow-backs from the valise. The outer 

one, a twenty, he shucked off and beckoned to a newsboy. 

'Son,' said he, 'run somewhere and get this changed for me. I'm 

mighty nigh out of chicken feed; I guess you'll get a nickel if you'll 

hurry up.' 

A hurt look appeared through the dirt on the newsy's face. 

'Aw, watchert'ink! G'wan and get yer funny bill changed yerself. 

Dey ain't no farm clothes yer got on. G'wan wit yer stage money.' 

On a corner lounged a keen-eyed steerer for a gamblinghouse. He saw Haylocks, and his expression suddenly grew cold 

and virtuous. 

'Mister,' said the rural one. 'I've heard of places in this here 

town where a fellow could have a good game of old sledge or peg a 

card at keno. I got $950 in this valise, and I come down from old 

Ulster to see the sights. Know where a fellow could get action on 

about $9 or $10? I'm goin' to have some sport, and then maybe I'll 

buy out a business of some kind.' 

The steerer looked pained, and investigated a white speck on his 

left forefinger nail. 

'Cheese it, old man,' he murmured reproachfully. 'The Central 

290 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

Office must be bughouse to send you out looking like such a gillie. 

You couldn't get within two blocks of a sidewalk crap game in 

them Tony Pastor props. The recent Mr. Scotty from Death 

Valley has got you beat a crosstown block in the way of Eliza­

bethan 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 artifi­

cialities, Haylocks sat upon the kerb and presented his thoughts to 

hold a conference. 

'It's my clothes,' said he; 'durned if it ain't. They think I'm a 

hayseed and won't have nothin' to do with me. Nobody never 

made fun of this hat in Ulster County. I guess if you want folks to 

notice you in New York you must dress up like they do.' 

So Haylocks went shopping in the bazaars where men spake 

through their noses and rubbed their hands and ran the tape line 

ecstatically over the bulge in his inside pocket where reposed a red 

nubbin of corn with an even number of rows. And messengers 

bearing parcels and boxes streamed to his hotel on Broadway 

within the lights of Long Acre. 

At nine o'clock in the evening one descended to the sidewalk 

whom Ulster County would have forsworn. Bright tan were his 

shoes; his hat the latest block. His light grey trousers were deeply 

creased; a gay blue silk handkerchief flapped from the breast 

pocket of his elegant English walking-coat. His collar might have 

graced a laundry window; his blond hair was trimmed close; the 

wisp of hay was gone. 

For an instant he stood, resplendent, with the leisurely air of a 

boulevardier concocting in his mind the route for his evening 

pleasures. And then he turned down the gay, bright street with the 

easy and graceful tread of a millionaire. 

But in the instant that he had paused the wisest and keenest eyes 

in the city had enveloped him in their field of vision. A stout man 

with grey eyes picked two of his friends with a lift of his eyebrows 

from the row of loungers in front of the hotel. 

'The juiciest jay I've seen in six months,' said the man with grey 

eyes. 'Come along.' 

It was half-past eleven when a man galloped into the West 

Forty-seventh Street police-station with the story of his wrongs. 

'Nine hundred and fifty dollars,' he gasped, 'all my share of 

grandmother's farm.' 

The desk sergeant wrung from him the name Jabez Bulltongue, 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 291 

of Locust Valley Farm, Ulster County, and then began to take 

descriptions of the strong-arm gentlemen. 

When Conant went to see the editor about the fate of his poem, 

he was received over the head of the office boy into the inner 

office that is decorated with the statuettes by Rodin and J. G. 

Brown. 

'When I read the first line of "The Doe and the Brook," ' said 

the editor, 'I knew it to be the work of one whose life has been 

heart to heart with nature. The finished art of the line did not 

blind me to that fact. To use a somewhat homely comparison, it 

was as if a wild, free child of the woods and fields were to don the 

garb of fashion and walk down Broadway. Beneath the apparel the 

man would show.' 

'Thanks,' said Conant. 'I suppose the cheque will be round on 

Thursday, as usual.' 

The morals of this story have somehow gotten mixed. You can 

take your choice of 'Stay on the Farm' or 'Don't write Poetry.' 

XLVIII 

The Thing's the Play 

BEING ACQUAINTED WITH a newspaper reporter who had a couple 

of free passes, I got to see the performance a few nights ago at one 

of the popular vaudeville houses. 

One of the numbers was a violin solo by a striking-looking man 

not much past forty, but with very grey, thick hair. Not being 

afflicted with a taste for music, I let the system of noises drift past 

my ears while I regarded the man. 

'There was a story about that chap a month or two ago,' said the 

reporter. 'They gave me the assignment. It was to run a column 

and was to be on the extremely light and joking order. The old 

man seems to like the funny touch I give to local happenings. Oh 

yes, I'm working on a farce comedy now. Well, I went down to the 

house and got all the details; but I certainly fell down on that job. I 

went back and turned in a comic write-up of an east side funeral 

instead. Why? Oh, I couldn't seem to get hold of it with my funny 

hooks, somehow. Maybe you could make a one-act tragedy out of 

it for a curtain-raiser. I'll give you the details.' 

After the performance my friend, the reporter, recited to me the 

facts over the Würzburger. 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 2 97 

racking, petitionary music of a violin. The hag, music, bewitches 

some of the noblest. The daws may peck upon one's sleeve with­

out in injury, but whoever wears his heart upon his tympanum 

gets it not far from the neck. 

This music and the musician called her, and at her side honour 

and the old love held her back. 

'Forgive me,' he pleaded. 

'Twenty years is a long time to remain away from the one you 

say you love,' she declared, with a purgatorial touch. 

'How could I tell?' he begged. 'I will conceal nothing from you. 

That night when he left I followed him. I was mad with jealousy. 

On a dark street I struck him down. He did not rise. I examined 

him. His head had struck a stone. I did not intend to kill him. I 

was mad with love and jealousy. I hid near by and saw an ambu­

lance take him away. Although you married him, Helen - ' 

'Who are you?' cried the woman, with wide-open eyes, snatching 

her hand away. 

'Don't you remember me, Helen - the one who has always 

loved you the best? I am John Delaney. If you can forgive - ' 

But she was gone, leaping, stumbling, hurrying, flying up the 

stairs toward the music and him who had forgotten, but who had 

known her for his in each of his two existences, and as she climbed 

up she sobbed, cried and sang: 'Frank! Frank! Frank!' 

Three mortals thus juggling with years as though they were bil­

liard balls, and my friend, the reporter, couldn't see anything 

funny in it! 

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. 

298 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

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

occur. The attack came suddenly. 

For many weeks I had been toiling, almost night and day, at a 

famous railroad law case that I won triumphantly but a few days 

previously. In fact, I had been digging away at the law almost 

without cessation for many years. Once or twice good Doctor 

Volney, my friend and physician, had warned me. 

'If you don't slacken up, Bellford,' he said, 'you'll go suddenly to 

pieces. Either your nerves or your brain will give way. Tell me, 

does a week pass in which you do not read in the papers of a case 

of aphasia - of some man lost, wandering nameless, with his past 

and his identity blotted out - and all from that little brain-clot 

made by overwork or worry?' 

'I always thought,' said I, 'that the clot in those instances was 

really to be found on the brains of the newspaper reporters.' 

Dr. Volney shook his head. 

'The disease exists,' he said. 'You need a change or a rest. 

Court-room, office and home - there is the only route you travel. 

For recreation you - read law books. Better take warning in time.' 

'On Thursday nights,' I said defensively, 'my wife and I play 

cribbage. On Sundays she reads to me the weekly letter from her 

mother. That law books are not a recreation remains yet to be 

established.' 

That morning as I walked I was thinking of Doctor Volney's 

words. I was feeling as well as I usually did - possibly in better 

spirits than usual. 

I awoke with stiff and cramped muscles from having slept long 

on the incommodious seat of a day coach. I leaned my head 

against the seat and tried to think. After a long time I said to 

myself: 'I must have a name of some sort.' I searched my pockets. 

Not a card; not a letter; not a paper or monogram could I find. 

But I found in my coat pocket nearly $3,000 in bills of large 

denomination. 'I must be someone, of course,' I repeated to 

myself, and began again to consider. 

The car was well crowded with men, among whom I told myself, 

there must have been some common interest, for they intermingled 

freely, and seemed in the best good-humour and spirits. One of 

them - a stout, spectacled gentleman enveloped in a decided odour 

of cinnamon and aloes - took the vacant half of my seat with a 

friendly nod, and unfolded a newspaper. In the intervals between 

his periods of reading, we conversed, as travellers will, on current 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 299 

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

jects 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 drug­

gist, 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-gran­

ule 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 carry­

ing a sideline of confectionery and shoes. I tell you, Hampinker, I've 

got an idea to spring on this convention - new ideas is what they 

want. Now, you know the shelf bottles of tartar emetic and Rochelle 

salt Ant. et Pot. Tart. and Sod. et Pot. Tart. - one's poison, you 

know, and the other's harmless. It's easy to mistake one label for the 

other. Where do druggists mostly keep 'em? Why, as far apart as 

possible, on different shelves. That's wrong. I say keep 'em side by 

side so when you want one you can always compare it with the other 

and avoid mistakes. Do you catch the idea?' 

'It seems to me a very good one,' I said. 

'All right! When I spring it on the convention you back it up. 

We'll make some of these Eastern orange-phosphate-and-massage-cream professors that think they're the only lozenges in the 

market look like hypodermic tablets.' 

'If I can be of any aid,' I said, warming, 'the two bottles of - er - ' 

'Tartrate of antimony and potash, and tartrate of soda and 

potash.' 

300 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

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

'Now, there's another thing,' said Mr. Bolder. 'For an excipient 

in manipulating a pill mass which do you prefer - the magnesia 

carbonate or the pulverized glycerrhiza radix?' 

'The - er - magnesia,' I said. It was easier to say than the other 

word. 

Mr. Bolder glanced at me distrustfully through his spectacles. 

'Give me the glycerrhiza,' said he. 'Magnesia cakes.' 

'Here's another one of these fake aphasia cases,' he said, 

presently, handing me his newspaper, and laying his finger upon 

an article. 'I don't believe in 'em. I put nine out of ten of 'em 

down as frauds. A man gets sick of his business and his folks and 

wants to have a good time. He skips out somewhere, and when 

they find him he pretends to have lost his memory - don't know 

his own name, and won't even recognize the strawberry mark on 

his wife's left shoulder. Aphasia! Tut! Why can't they stay at home 

and forget?' 

I took the paper and read, after the pungent headlines, the fol­

lowing: 

'DENVER, June 12. - Elwyn C. Bellford, a prominent lawyer, is mysteri­

ously 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 stand­

ing, 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 disappear­

ance, 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. Rail­

road Company. It is feared that overwork may have affected his mind. Every 

effort is being made to discover the whereabouts of the missing man.' 

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

said, after I had read the despatch. 'This has the sound, to me, of a 

genuine case. Why should this man, prosperous, happily married 

and respected, choose suddenly to abandon everything? I know that 

these lapses of memory do occur, and that men do find themselves 

adrift without a name, a history or a home.' 

'Oh, gammon and jalap!' said Mr. Bolder. 'It's larks they're 

after. There's too much education nowadays. Men know about 

aphasia, and they use it for an excuse. The women are wise, too. 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 301 

When it's all over they look you in the eye, as scientific as you 

please, and say: "He hypnotized me." ' 

Thus Mr. Bolder diverted, but did not aid me with his com­

ments 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 regis­

ter. As I did so I felt pervade me a splendid, wild, intoxicating 

buoyancy - a sense of unlimited freedom, of newly attained possi­

bilities. 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 Western­

ers,' I said, 'in regard to a recommendation to the convention that 

the bottles containing the tartrate of antimony and potash, and the 

tartrate of sodium and potash, be kept in a contiguous position on 

the shelf.' 

'Gentleman to three-fourteen,' said the clerk hastily. I was 

whisked away to my room. 

The next day I bought a trunk and clothing, and began to live 

the life of Edward Pinkhammer. I did not tax my brain with 

endeavours to solve problems of the past. 

It was a piquant and sparkling cup that the great island city held 

up to my lips. I drank of it gratefully. The keys of Manhattan 

belong to him who is able to bear them. You must be either the 

city's guest or its victim. 

The following few days were as gold and silver. Edward 

Pinkhammer, yet counting back to his birth by hours only, knew 

the rare joy of having come upon so diverting a world full-fledged 

and unrestrained. I sat entranced on the magic carpets provided in 

theatres and roof-gardens, that transported one into strange and 

delightful lands full of frolicsome music, pretty girls and 

grotesque, drolly extravagant parodies upon humankind. I went 

here and there at my own dear will, bound by no limits of space, 

302 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

time or comportment. I dined in weird cabarets, at weirder tables 

d'hôte to the sound of Hungarian music and the wild shouts of 

mercurial artists and sculptors. Or, again, where the night life 

quivers in the electric glare like a kinetoscopic picture, and the 

millinery of the world, and its jewels, and the ones whom they 

adorn, and the men who make all three possible are met for good 

cheer and the spectacular effect. And among all these scenes that I 

have mentioned I learned one thing that I never knew before. And 

that is that the key to liberty is not in the hands of Licence, but 

Convention holds it. Comity has a toll-gate at which you must 

pay, or you may not enter the land of Freedom. In all the glitter, 

the seeming disorder, the parade, the abandon, I saw this law, 

unobtrusive, yet like iron, prevail. Therefore, in Manhattan you 

must obey these unwritten laws, and then you will be freest of the 

free. If you decline to be bound by them, you put on shackles. 

Sometimes, as my mood urged me, I would seek the stately, 

softly murmuring palm-rooms, redolent with high-born life and 

delicate restraint, in which to dine. Again I would go down to the 

waterways in steamers packed with vociferous, bedecked, 

unchecked, love-making clerks and shop-girls to their crude plea­

sures on the island shores. And there was always Broadway - glis­

tening, 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 bag­

gage brought down in half an hour. I do not care to remain where 

I am annoyed by confidence men.' 

I moved that afternoon to another hotel, a sedate, old-fashioned 

one on lower Fifth Avenue. 

There was a restaurant a little way off Broadway where one 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 303 

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

Quiet and luxury and a perfect service made it an ideal place in 

which to take luncheon or refreshment. One afternoon I was there 

picking my way to a table among the ferns when I felt my sleeve 

caught. 

'Mr. Bellford!' exclaimed an amazingly sweet voice. 

I turned quickly to see a lady seated alone - a lady of about 

thirty, with exceedingly handsome eyes, who looked at me as 

though I had been her very dear friend. 

'You were about to pass me,' she said accusingly. 'Don't tell me 

you did not know me. Why should we not shake hands - at least 

once in fifteen years?' 

I shook hands with her at once. I took a chair opposite her at 

the table. I summoned with my eyebrows a hovering waiter. The 

lady was philandering with an orange ice. I ordered a crème de 

menthe. Her hair was reddish bronze. You could not look at it, 

because you could not look away from her eyes. But you were conscious of it as you are conscious of sunset while you look into the 

profundities of a wood at twilight. 

'Are you sure you know me?' I asked. 

'No,' she said, smiling, 'I was never sure of that.' 

'What would you think,' I said, a little anxiously, 'if I were to 

tell you that my name is Edward Pinkhammer, from Cornopolis, 

Kansas.' 

'What would I think?' she repeated, with a merry glance. 'Why, 

that you had not brought Mrs. Bellford to New York with you, of 

course. I do wish you had. I would have liked to see Marian.' Her 

voice lowered slightly - 'You haven't changed much, Elwyn.' 

I felt her wonderful eyes searching mine and my face more 

closely. 

'Yes, you have,' she amended, and there was a soft, exultant note 

in her latest tones; 'I see it now. You haven't forgotten. You 

haven't forgotten for a year or a day or an hour. I told you you 

never could.' 

I poked my straw anxiously in the crème de menthe. 

'I'm sure I beg your pardon,' I said, a little uneasy at her gaze. 

'But that is just the trouble. I have forgotten. I've forgotten 

everything.' 

She flouted my denial. She laughed deliciously at something she 

seemed to see in my face. 

'I've heard of you at times,' she went on. 'You're quite a big 

lawyer out West - Denver, isn't it, or Los Angeles? Marian must 

304 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

be very proud of you. You knew, I suppose, that I married six 

months after you did. You may have seen it in the papers. The 

flowers alone cost two thousand dollars.' 

She had mentioned fifteen years. Fifteen years is a long time. 

'Would it be too late,' I asked somewhat timorously, 'to offer 

you congratulations?' 

'Not if you dare do it,' she answered, with such fine intrepidity 

that I was silent, and began to crease patterns on the cloth with my 

thumb-nail. 

'Tell me one thing,' she said, leaning toward me rather eagerly -

'a thing I have wanted to know for many years - just from a 

woman's curiosity, of course - have you ever dared since that 

night to touch, smell or look at white roses - at white roses wet 

with rain and dew?' 

I took a sip of crème de menthe. 

It would be useless, I suppose,' I said, with a sigh, 'for me 

to repeat that I have no recollection at all about these things. 

My memory is completely at fault. I need not say how much I 

regret it.' 

The lady rested her arms upon the table, and again her eyes disdained my words and went travelling by their own route direct to 

my soul. She laughed softly, with a strange quality in the sound -

it was a laugh of happiness yes, and of content - and of misery. I 

tried to look away from her. 

'You lie, Elwyn Bellford,' she breathed blissfully. 'Oh, I know 

you lie!' 

I gazed dully into the ferns. 

'My name is Edward Pinkhammer,' I said. 'I came with the delegates to the Druggists' National Convention. There is a movement on foot for arranging a new position for the bottles of 

tartrate of antimony and tartrate of potash, in which, very likely, 

you would take little interest.' 

A shining landau stopped before the entrance. The lady rose. I 

took her hand, and bowed. 

'I am deeply sorry,' I said to her, 'that I cannot remember. I 

could explain, but fear you would not understand. You will not 

concede Pinkhammer; and I really cannot at all conceive of the -

the roses and other things.' 

'Good-bye, Mr. Bellford,' she said, with her happy, sorrowful 

smile, as she stepped into her carriage. 

I attended the theatre that night. When I returned to my hotel, 

a quiet man in dark clothes, who seemed interested in rubbing his 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 305 

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

side. 

'Mr. Pinkhammer,' he said casually, giving the bulk of his atten­

tion 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 will­

ing at all to entertain the hypothesis that my name is Edward 

Pinkhammer, and that I never saw you before in my life?' 

Before the man could reply a wailing cry came from the woman. 

She sprang past his detaining arm. 'Elwyn!' she sobbed, and cast 

herself upon me, and clung tight. 'Elwyn,' she cried again, 'don't 

break my heart. I am your wife - call my name once - just once! I 

could see you dead rather than this way.' 

I unwound her arms respectfully, but firmly. 

'Madam,' I said severely, 'pardon me if I suggest that you 

accept a resemblance too precipitately. It is a pity,' I went on, 

with an amused laugh, as the thought occurred to me, 'that this 

Bellford and I could not be kept side by side upon the same shelf 

like tartrates of sodium and antimony for purposes of identifica­

tion. In order to understand the allusion,' I concluded airily, 'it 

may be necessary for you to keep an eye on the proceedings of 

the Druggists' National Convention.' 

The lady turned to her companion, and grasped his arm. 

'What is it, Doctor Volney? Oh, what is it?' she moaned. 

306 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

He led her to the door. 

'Go to your room for awhile,' I heard him say. 'I will remain 

and talk with him. His mind? No, I think not - only a portion of 

the brain. Yes, I am sure he will recover. Go to your room and 

leave me with him.' 

The lady disappeared. The man in dark clothes also went out­

side, 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 extrava­

gantly admire the name of Pinkhammer. But when one christens 

one's self, suddenly the fine names do not seem to suggest them­

selves. 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, per­

haps, a life too bare of natural recreation and pleasures. The lady 

who has just left the room is your wife.' 

'She is what I would call a fine-looking woman,' I said, after a 

judicial pause. 'I particularly admire the shade of brown in her 

hair.' 

'She is a wife to be proud of. Since your disappearance, nearly 

two weeks ago, she has scarcely closed her eyes. We learned that 

you were in New York through a telegram sent by Isidore 

Newman, a travelling man from Denver. He said that he had met 

you in an hotel here, and that you did not recognize him.' 

'I think I remember the occasion,' I said. 'The fellow called me 

"Bellford," if I am not mistaken. But don't you think it about time, 

now, for you to introduce yourself?' 

'I am Robert Volney - Doctor Volney. I have been your close 

friend for twenty years, and your physician for fifteen. I came with 

Mrs. Bellford to trace you as soon as we got the telegram. Try, 

Elwyn, old man - try to remember!' 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 307 

'What's the use to try!' I asked, with a little frown. 'You say you 

are a physician. Is aphasia curable? When a man loses his memory, 

does it return slowly, or suddenly?' 

'Sometimes gradually and imperfectly; sometimes as suddenly as 

it went.' 

'Will you undertake the treatment of my case, Doctor Volney?' 

I asked. 

'Old friend,' said he, 'I'll do everything in my power, and will 

have done everything that science can do to cure you.' 

'Very well,' said I. 'Then you will consider that I am your patient. 

Everything is in confidence now - professional confidence.' 

'Of course,' said Doctor Volney. 

I got up from the couch. Someone had set a vase of white roses 

on the centre table - a cluster of white roses freshly sprinkled and 

fragrant. I threw them far out of the window, and then I laid 

myself upon the couch again. 

'It will be best, Bobby,' I said, 'to have this cure happen sud­

denly. 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 Californi­

ans. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabi­

tants of a State. They are the Southerners of the West. Now, 

Chicagoans are no less loyal to their city; but when you ask them 

why, they stammer and speak of lake fish and the new Odd Fellows 

Building. But Californians go into detail. 

308 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

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

for half an hour while you are thinking of your coal bills and heavy 

underwear. But as soon as they come to mistake your silence for 

conviction, madness comes upon them, and they picture the city 

of the Golden Gate as the Bagdad of the New World. So far, as a 

matter of opinion, no refutation is necessary. But, dear cousins all 

(from Adam and Eve descended), it is a rash one who will lay his 

finger on the map and say: 'In this town there can be no romance 

- what could happen here?' Yes, it is a bold and a rash deed to 

challenge in one sentence history, romance, and Rand and 

McNally. 

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

nessee, 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-suppres­

sion 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 atten­

tion full of exquisite Southern courtesy, the service as slow as the 

progress of a snail and as good-humoured as Rip Van Winkle. 

The food was worth travelling a thousand miles for. There is no 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 3 09 

other hotel in the world where you can get such chicken livers en 

brochette. 

At dinner I asked a negro waiter if there was anything doing in 

town. He pondered gravely for a minute, and then replied: 

'Well, boss, I don't really reckon there's anything at all doin' 

after sundown.' 

Sundown had been accomplished; it had been drowned in the 

drizzle long before. So that spectacle was denied me. But I went 

forth upon the streets in the drizzle to see what might be there. 

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

a cost of $32,470 per annum. 

As I left the hotel there was a race riot. Down upon me charged 

a company of freedmen, or Arabs, or Zulus, armed with - no, I 

saw with relief that they were not rifles, but whips. And I saw 

dimly a caravan of black, clumsy vehicles; and at the reassuring 

shouts, 'Kyar you anywhere in the town, boss, fuh fifty cents,' I 

reasoned that I was merely a 'fare' instead of a victim. 

I walked through long streets, all leading uphill. I wondered how 

those streets ever came down again. Perhaps they didn't until they 

were 'graded.' On a few of the 'main streets' I saw lights in stores 

here and there; saw street-cars go by conveying worthy burghers 

hither and yon; saw people pass engaged in the art of conversation, 

and heard a burst of semi-lively laughter issuing from a soda-water 

and ice-cream parlour. The streets other than 'main' seemed to 

have enticed upon their borders houses consecrated to peace and 

domesticity. In many of them lights shone behind discreetly drawn 

window shades; in a few pianos tinkled orderly and irreproachable 

music. There was, indeed, little 'doing.' I wished I had come before 

sundown. So I returned to my hotel. 

In November, 1864, the Confederate General Hood advanced against 

Nashville, where he shut up a National force under General Thomas. The 

latter then sallied forth and defeated the confederates in a terrible conflict. 

All my life I have heard of, admired, and witnessed the fine 

markmanship of the South in its peaceful conflicts in the tobaccochewing regions. But in my hotel a surprise awaited me. There 

were twelve bright, new, imposing, capacious brass cuspidors in 

the great lobby, tall enough to be called urns and so widemouthed that the crack pitcher of a lady baseball team should 

3 10 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

have been able to throw a ball into one of them at five paces dis­

tant. 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 addi­

tion of one murder. 

I happened to be standing within five feet of a cuspidor when 

Major Caswell opened fire upon it. I had been observant enough 

to perceive that the attacking force was using Gatlings instead of 

squirrel rifles; so I side-stepped so promptly that the major seized 

the opportunity to apologize to a non-combatant. He had the 

blabbing lip. In four minutes he had become my friend and had 

dragged me to the bar. 

I desire to interpolate here that I am a Southerner. But I am not 

one by profession or trade. I eschew the string tie, the slouch hat, 

the Prince Albert, the number of bales of cotton destroyed by 

Sherman, and plug chewing. When the orchestra plays Dixie I do 

not cheer. I slide a little lower on the leather-cornered seat and, 

well, order another Würzburger and wish that Longstreet had -

but what's the use? 

Major Caswell banged the bar with his fist, and the first gun at 

Fort Sumter re-echoed. When he fired the last one at Appomattox 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 311 

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

strated that Adam was only a third cousin of a collateral branch of 

the Caswell family. Genealogy disposed of, he took up, to my dis­

taste, 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 entertain­

ment, 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 Thurs­

day. 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 driz­

zle 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 ceil­

ing of the occupant of the room beneath mine. 'Nothing of the 

life here that gives colour and variety to the cities in the East and 

West. Just a good, ordinary, humdrum business town.' 

Nashville occupies a foremost place among the manufacturing centres of the 

country. It is the fifth boot and shoe market in the United States, the largest 

candy and cracker manufacturing city in the South, and does an enormous 

wholesale dry goods, grocery and drug business. 

312 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

I must tell you how I came to be in Nashville, and assure you 

the digression brings as much tedium to me as it does to you. I 

was travelling elsewhere on my own business, but I had a commission from a Northern literary magazine to stop over there and 

establish a personal connection between the publication and one 

of its contributors, Azalea Adair. 

Adair (there was no clue to the personality except the handwriting) had sent in some essays (lost art!) and poems that had made 

the editors swear approvingly over their one o'clock luncheon. So 

they had commissioned me to round up said Adair and corner by 

contract his or her output at two cents a word before some other 

publisher offered her ten or twenty. 

At nine o'clock the next morning, after my chicken livers en brochette (try them if you can find that hotel), I strayed out into the 

drizzle, which was still on for an unlimited run. At the first corner 

I came upon Uncle Cæsar. He was a stalwart negro, older than the 

pyramids, with grey wool and a face that reminded me of Brutus, 

and a second afterwards of the late King Cetewayo. He wore the 

most remarkable coat that I ever had seen or expect to see. It 

reached to his ankles and had once been a Confederate grey in 

colours. But rain and sun and age had so variegated it that Joseph's 

coat, beside it, would have faded to a pale monochrome. I must 

linger with that coat for it has to do with the story - the story that 

is so long in coming, because you can hardly expect anything to 

happen in Nashville. 

Once it must have been the military coat of an officer. The cape 

of it had vanished, but all adown its front it had been frogged and 

tasselled magnificently. But now the frogs and tassels were gone. 

In their stead had been patiently stitched (I surmised by some surviving 'black mammy') new frogs made of cunningly twisted 

common hempen twine. This twine was frayed and dishevelled. It 

must have been added to the coat as a substitute for vanished 

splendours, with tasteless but painstaking devotion, for it followed 

faithfully the curves of the long-missing frogs. And, to complete 

the comedy and pathos of the garment, all its buttons were gone 

save one. The second button from the top alone remained. The 

coat was fastened by other twine strings tied through the buttonholes and other holes rudely pierced in the opposite side. There 

was never such a weird garment so fantastically bedecked and of so 

many mottled hues. The lone button was the size of a half-dollar, 

made of yellow horn and sewed on with coarse twine. 

This negro stood by a carriage so old that Ham himself might 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 313 

have started a hack line with it after he left the ark with the two 

animals hitched to it. As I approached he threw open the door, 

drew out a leather duster, waved it, without using it, and said in 

deep, rumbling tones: 

'Step right in, suh; ain't a speck of dust in it - jus' back from a 

funeral, suh.' 

I inferred that on such gala occasions carriages were given an 

extra cleaning. I looked up and down the street and perceived that 

there was little choice among the vehicles for hire that lined the 

kerb. I looked in my memorandum book for the address of Azalea 

Adair. 

'I want to go to 861 Jessamine Street,' I said, and was about to 

step into the hack. But for an instant the thick, long, gorilla-like 

arm of the old negro barred me. On his massive and saturnine face 

a look of sudden suspicion and enmity flashed for a moment. 

Then, with quickly returning conviction, he asked blandishingly: 

'What are you gwine there for, boss?' 

'What is that to you?' I asked a little sharply. 

'Nothin', suh, jus' nothin'. Only it's a lonesome kind of part of 

town and few folks ever has business out there. Step right in. The 

seats is clean - jes' got back from a funeral, suh.' 

A mile and a half it must have been to our journey's end. I could 

hear nothing but the fearful rattle of the ancient hack over the 

uneven brick paving; I could smell nothing but the drizzle, now 

further flavoured with coal smoke and something like a mixture of 

tar and oleander blossoms. All I could see through the streaming 

windows were two rows of dim houses. 

The city has an area of 10 square miles; 181 miles of streets, of which 137 

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

mains. 

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

yards back from the street it stood, outmerged in a splendid grove 

of trees and untrimmed shrubbery. A row of box bushes over­

flowed 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 

3 1 4 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

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

so. He refused it. 

'It's two dollars, suh,' he said. 

'How's that?' I asked. 'I plainly heard you call out at the hotel: 

"Fifty cents to any part of the town." ' 

'It's two dollars, suh,' he repeated obstinately. 'It's a long ways 

from the hotel.' 

'It is within the city limits and well within them,' I argued. 

'Don't think that you have picked up a greenhorn Yankee. Do you 

see those hills over there?' I went on, pointing toward the east (I 

could not see them, myself, for the drizzle); 'well, I was born and 

raised on their other side. You old fool nigger, can't you tell 

people from other people when you see em?' 

The grim face of King Cetewayo softened. 'Is you from the 

South, suh? I reckon it was them shoes of yourn fooled me. There 

is somethin' sharp in the toes for a Southern gen'l'man to wear.' 

'Then the charge is fifty cents, I suppose?' said I inexorably. 

His former expression, a mingling of cupidity and hostility, 

returned, remained ten minutes, and vanished. 

'Boss,' he said, 'fifty cents is right; but I needs two dollars, suh; 

I'm obleeged to have two dollars. I ain't demandin' it now, suh; 

after I knows whar you's from; I'm jus' sayin' that I has to have 

two dollars to-night, and business is mighty po'.' 

Peace and confidence settled upon his heavy features. He had 

been luckier than he had hoped. Instead of having picked up a 

greenhorn, ignorant of rates, he had come upon an inheritance. 

'You confounded old rascal,' I said, reaching down into my 

pocket, 'you ought to be turned over to the police.' 

For the first time I saw him smile. He knew; he knew; HE KNEW. 

I gave him two one-dollar bills. As I handed them over I noticed 

that one of them had seen parlous times. Its upper right-hand 

corner was missing, and it had been torn through in the middle 

but joined again. A strip of blue tissue-paper, pasted over the split, 

preserved its negotiability. 

Enough of the African bandit for the present: I left him happy, 

lifted the rope and opened the creaky gate. 

The house, as I said, was a shell. A paint-brush had not touched 

it in twenty years. I could not see why a strong wind should not 

have bowled it over like a house of cards until I looked again at the 

trees that hugged it close - the trees that saw the battle of 

Nashville and still drew their protecting branches around it 

against storm and enemy and cold. 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 315 

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

cavaliers, as thin and frail as the house she lived in, robed in the 

cheapest and cleanest dress I ever saw, with an air as simple as a 

queen's, received me. 

The reception-room seemed a mile square, because there was 

nothing in it except some rows of books, on unpainted, white-pine 

bookshelves, a cracked, marble-top table, a rag rug, a hairless horse­

hair 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 nur­

tured 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 exquis­

ite, she was a valuable discovery. Nearly everybody nowadays 

knows too much - oh, so much too much - of real life. 

I could perceive clearly that Azalea Adair was very poor. A 

house and a dress she had, not much else, I fancied. So, divided 

between my duty to the magazine and my loyalty to the poets and 

essayists who fought Thomas in the valley of the Cumberland, I 

listened to her voice, which was like a harpsichord's, and found 

that I could not speak of contracts. In the presence of the Nine 

Muses and the Three Graces one hesitated to lower the topic to 

two cents. There would have to be another colloquy after I had 

regained my commercialism. But I spoke of my mission, and 

three o'clock of the next afternoon was set for the discussion of 

the business proposition. 

'Your town,' I said, as I began to make ready to depart (which is 

the time for smooth generalities), 'seems to be a quiet, sedate 

place. A home town, I should say, where few things out of the 

ordinary ever happen.' 

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

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

316 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

Azalea Adair seemed to reflect. 

'I have never thought of it that way,' she said, with a kind of sin­

cere intensity that seemed to belong to her. 'Isn't it in the still, 

quiet places that things do happen? I fancy that when God began 

to create the earth on the first Monday morning one could have 

leaned out one's windows and heard the drop of mud splashing 

from His trowel as He built up the everlasting hills. What did the 

noisiest project in the world - I mean the building of the tower of 

Babel - result in finally? A page and a half of Esperanto in the 

North American Review.' 

'Of course,' said I platitudinously, 'human nature is the same 

everywhere; but there is more colour - er - more drama and 

movement and - er - romance in some cities than in others.' 

'On the surface,' said Azalea Adair. 'I have travelled many 

times around the world in a golden airship wafted on two wings 

- print and dreams. I have seen (on one of my imaginary tours) 

the Sultan of Turkey bow-string with his own hands one of his 

wives who had uncovered her face in public. I have seen a man in 

Nashville tear up his theatre tickets because his wife was going 

out with her face covered - with rice powder. In San Francisco's 

Chinatown I saw the slave girl Sing Yee dipped slowly, inch by 

inch, in boiling almond oil to make her swear she would never 

see her American lover again. She gave in when the boiling oil 

had reached three inches above her knee. At a euchre party in 

East Nashville the other night I saw Kitty Morgan cut dead by 

seven of her schoolmates and lifelong friends because she had 

married a house painter. The boiling oil was sizzling as high as 

her heart; but I wish you could have seen the fine little smile that 

she carried from table to table. Oh yes, it is a humdrum town. 

Just a few miles of redbrick houses and mud and stores and 

lumber yards.' 

Someone knocked hollowly at the back of the house. Azalea 

Adair breathed a soft apology and went to investigate the sound. 

She came back in three minutes with brightened eyes, a faint flush 

on her cheeks, and ten years lifted from her shoulders. 

'You must have a cup of tea before you go,' she said, 'and a 

sugar cake.' 

She reached and shook a little iron bell. In shuffled a small 

negro girl about twelve, bare-foot, not very tidy, glowering at me 

with thumb in mouth and bulging eyes. 

Azalea Adair opened a tiny, worn purse and drew out a dollar 

bill, a dollar bill with the upper right-hand corner missing, torn in 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 3 17 

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 impos­

sible to get the kind I always use at the store. Perhaps to-morrow 

Mr. Baker will be able to supply me.' 

I was sure that Impy had not had time to leave the house. I 

inquired concerning street-car lines and took my leave. After I was 

well on my way I remembered that I had not learned Azalea 

Adair's name. But to-morrow would do. 

That same day I started in on the course of iniquity that this 

uneventful city forced upon me. I was in the town only two days, 

but in that time I managed to lie shamelessly by telegraph, and to 

be an accomplice - after the fact, if that is the correct legal term -

to a murder. 

As I rounded the corner nearest my hotel the Afrite coachman 

of the polychromatic, nonpareil coat seized me, swung open the 

dungeony door of his peripatetic sarcophagus, flirted his feather 

duster and began his ritual: 'Step right in, boss. Carriage is clean -

jus' got back from a funeral. Fifty cents to any - ' 

And then he knew me and grinned broadly. ' 'Scuse me, boss; 

you is de gen'l'man what rid out with me dis mawnin'. Thank you 

kindly, suh.' 

'I am going out to 861 again to-morrow afternoon at three,' said 

I, 'and if you will be here, I'll let you drive me. So you know Miss 

Adair?' I concluded, thinking of my dollar bill. 

'I belonged to her father, Judge Adair, suh,' he replied. 

318 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

'I judge that she is pretty poor,' I said. 'She hasn't much money 

to speak of, has she?' 

For an instant I looked again at the fierce countenance of King 

Cetewayo, and then he changed back to an extortionate old negro 

hack-driver. 

'She a'n't gwine to starve, suh,' he said slowly. 'She has reso'ces, 

suh; she has reso'ces.' 

'I shall pay you fifty cents for the trip,' said I. 

'Dat is puffeckly correct, suh,' he answered humbly; 'I jus' had 

to have dat two dollars dis mawnin, boss.' 

I went to the hotel and lied by electricity. I wired the magazine: 

'A. Adair holds out for eight cents a word.' 

The answer that came back was: 'Give it to her quick, you 

duffer.' 

Just before dinner 'Major' Wentworth Caswell bore down upon 

me with the greetings of a long-lost friend. I have seen few men 

whom I have so instantaneously hated, and of whom it was so dif­

ficult to be rid. I was standing at the bar when he invaded me; 

therefore I could not wave the white ribbon in his face. I would 

have paid gladly for the drinks, hoping thereby to escape another, 

but he was one of those despicable, roaring, advertising bibbers 

who must have brass bands and fireworks attend upon every cent 

that they waste in their follies. 

With an air of producing millions he drew two one-dollar bills 

from a pocket and dashed one of them upon the bar. I looked once 

more at the dollar bill with the upper right-hand corner missing, torn 

through the middle, and patched with a strip of blue tissue-paper. It 

was my dollar bill again. It could have been no other. 

I went up to my room. The drizzle and the monotony of a 

dreary, eventless Southern town had made me tired and listless. I 

remember that just before I went to bed I mentally disposed of the 

mysterious dollar bill (which might have formed the clue to a 

tremendously fine detective story of San Francisco) by saying to 

myself sleepily: 'Seems as if a lot of people here own stock in the 

Hack-Driver's Trust. Pays dividends promptly, too. Wonder if - ' 

Then I fell asleep. 

King Cetewayo was at his post the next day, and rattled my 

bones over the stones out to 861. He was to wait and rattle me 

back again when I was ready. 

Azalea Adair looked paler and cleaner and frailer than she had 

looked on the day before. After she had signed the contract at eight 

cents per word she grew still paler and began to slip out of her chair. 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 319 

Without much trouble I managed to get her up on the antediluvian 

horsehair sofa and then I ran out to the sidewalk and yelled to the 

coffee-coloured Pirate to bring a doctor. With a wisdom that I had 

not suspected in him, he abandoned his team and struck off up the 

street afoot, realizing the value of speed. In ten minutes he returned 

with a grave, grey-haired and capable man of medicine. In a few 

words (worth much less than eight cents each) I explained to him 

my presence in the hollow house of mystery. He bowed with stately 

understanding, and turned to the old negro. 

'Uncle Cæsar,' he said calmly, 'run up to my house and ask Miss 

Lucy to give you a cream pitcher full of fresh milk and half a tumbler of port wine. And hurry back. Don't drive - run. I want you 

to get back some time this week.' 

It occurred to me that Dr. Merriman also felt a distrust as to the 

speeding powers of the landpirate's steeds. After Uncle Cæsar was 

gone, lumberingly, but swiftly, up the street, the doctor looked me 

over with great politeness and as much careful calculation until he 

had decided that I might do. 

'It is only a case of insufficient nutrition,' he said. 'In other 

words, the result of poverty, pride, and starvation. Mrs. Caswell 

has many devoted friends who would be glad to aid her, but she 

will accept nothing except from that old negro, Uncle Cæsar, who 

was once owned by her family.' 

'Mrs. Caswell!' said I, in surprise. And then I looked at the 

contract and saw that she had signed it 'Azalea Adair Caswell.' 

'I thought she was Miss Adair,' I said. 

'Married to a drunken, worthless loafer, sir,' said the doctor. 'It 

is said that he robs her even of the small sums that her old servant 

contributes toward her support.' 

When the milk and wine had been brought, the doctor soon 

revived Azalea Adair. She sat up and talked of the beauty of the 

autumn leaves that were then in season, and their height of colour. 

She referred lightly to her fainting seizure as the outcome of an 

old palpitation of the heart. Impy fanned her as she lay on the 

sofa. The doctor was due elsewhere, and I followed him to the 

door. I told him that it was within my power and intentions to 

make a reasonable advance of money to Azalea Adair on future 

contributions to the magazine, and he seemed pleased. 

'By the way,' he said, 'perhaps you would like to know that you 

have had royalty for a coachman. Old Cæsar's grandfather was a 

king in Congo. Cæsar himself has royal ways, as you may have 

observed.' 

320 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

As the doctor was moving off I heard Uncle Cæsar's voice 

inside: 'Did he git bofe of dem two dollars from you, Mis' Zalea?' 

'Yes, Cæsar,' I heard Azalea Adair answer weakly. And then I 

went in and concluded business negotiations with our contributor. 

I assumed the responsibility of advancing fifty dollars, putting it as 

a necessary formality in binding our bargain. And then Uncle 

Cæsar drove me back to the hotel. 

Here ends all the story as far as I can testify as a witness. The 

rest must be only bare statements of facts. 

At about six o'clock I went out for a stroll. Uncle Cæsar was at 

his corner. He threw open the door of his carriage, flourished his 

duster and began his depressing formula: 'Step right in, suh. Fifty 

cents to anywhere in the city - hack's puffickly clean, suh - jus' got 

back from a funeral - ' 

And then he recognized me. I think his eyesight was getting 

bad. His coat had taken on a few more faded shades of colour, the 

twine strings were more frayed and ragged, the last remaining 

button - the button of yellow horn - was gone. A motley descendant of kings was Uncle Caesar. 

About two hours later I saw an excited crowd besieging the 

front of a drug store. In a desert where nothing happens this was 

manna; so I edged my way inside. On an extemporized couch of 

empty boxes and chairs was stretched the mortal corporeality of 

Major Wentworth Caswell. A doctor was testing him for the 

immortal ingredient. His decision was that it was conspicuous by 

its absence. 

The erstwhile Major had been found dead on a dark street and 

brought by curious and ennuied citizens to the drug store. The 

late human being had been engaged in terrific battle - the details 

showed that. Loafer and reprobate though he had been, he had 

been also a warrior. But he had lost. His hands were yet clenched 

so tightly that his fingers would not be opened. The gentle citizens who had known him stood about and searched their vocabularies to find some good words, if it were possible, to speak of him. 

One kind-looking man said, after much thought: 'When "Cas" 

was about fo'teen he was one of the best spellers in school.' 

While I stood there the fingers of the right hand of 'the man 

that was,' which hung down the side of a white pine box, relaxed, 

and dropped something at my feet. I covered it with one foot quietly, and a little later on I picked it up and pocketed it. I reasoned 

that in his last struggle his hand must have seized that object 

unwittingly and held it in a death-grip. 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 3 21 

At the hotel that night the main topic of conversation, with the 

possible exceptions of politics and prohibition, was the demise of 

Major Caswell. I heard one man say to a group of listeners: 

'In my opinion, gentlemen, Caswell was murdered by some of 

these no-account niggers for his money. He had fifty dollars this 

afternoon which he showed to several gentlemen in the hotel. 

When he was found the money was not on his person.' 

I left the city the next morning at nine, and as the train was 

crossing the bridge over the Cumberland River I took out of my 

pocket a yellow, horn, overcoat button the size of a fifty-cent 

piece, with frayed ends of coarse twine hanging from it, and cast it 

out of the window into the slow, muddy waters below. 

I wonder what's doing in Buffalo! 

LI 

Compliments of the Season 

THERE ARE NO MORE Christmas stories to write. Fiction is 

exhausted; and newspaper items the next best, are manufactured 

by clever young Journalists who have married early and have an 

engagingly pessimistic view of life. Therefore, for seasonable 

diversion, we are reduced to two very questionable sources - facts 

and philosophy. We will begin with - whichever you choose to 

call it. 

Children are pestilential little animals with which we have to 

cope under a bewildering variety of conditions. Especially when 

childish sorrows overwhelm them are we put to our wits' end. We 

exhaust our paltry store of consolation; and then beat them, sob­

bing, to sleep. Then we grovel in the dust of a million years, and 

ask God why. Thus we call out of the rat-trap. As for the chil­

dren, no one understands them except old maids, hunchbacks, 

and shepherd dogs. 

Now come the facts in the case of the Rag-Doll, the Tatterde­

malion, and the Twenty-fifth of December. 

On the tenth of that month the Child of the Millionaire lost her 

rag-doll. There were many servants in the Millionaire's palace on 

the Hudson, and these ransacked the house and grounds, but 

without finding the lost treasure. The Child was a girl of five, and 

one of those perverse little beasts that often wound the sensibili­

ties of wealthy parents by fixing their affections upon some vulgar, 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 3 29 

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

comp'ments sheason with lady th' house. ' 'Gainst princ'ples 

gen'leman do sho.' 

And then he began the ancient salutation that was a tradition in 

the House when men wore lace ruffles and powder. 

'The blessings of another year - ' 

Fuzzy's memory failed him. The Lady prompted: 

'- Be upon this hearth.' 

'- The guest - ' stammered Fuzzy. 

'- And upon her who - ' continued the Lady, with a leading 

smile. 

'Oh, cut it out,' said Fuzzy ill-manneredly. 'I can't remember. 

Drink hearty.' 

Fuzzy had shot his arrow. They drank. The Lady smiled again 

the smile of her caste. James enveloped Fuzzy and re-conducted 

him toward the front door. The harp music still softly drifted 

through the house. 

Outside, Black Riley breathed on his cold hands and hugged the 

gate. 

'I wonder,' said the Lady to herself, musing 'who - but there 

were so many who came. I wonder whether memory is a curse or a 

blessing to them after they have fallen so low.' 

Fuzzy and his escort were nearly at the door. The Lady called: 

'James!' 

James stalked back obsequiously, leaving Fuzzy waiting 

unsteadily, with his brief spark of the divine fire gone. 

Outside, Black Riley stamped his cold feet and got a firmer grip 

on his section of gas-pipe. 

'You will conduct this gentleman,' said the Lady, 'downstairs. 

Then tell Louis to get out the Mercedes and take him to whatever 

place he wishes to go.' 

LII 

Proof of the Pudding 

SPRING WINKED a vitreous optic at Editor Westbrook, of the Min­

erva Magazine, and deflected him from his course. He had lunched 

in his favourite corner of a Broadway hotel, and was returning to 

his office when his feet became entangled in the lure of the vernal 

coquette. Which is by way of saying that he turned eastward in 

330 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

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

Fifth Avenue, and meandered along the walks of budding Madison 

Square. 

The lenient air and the settings of the little park almost formed 

a pastoral; the colour motif was green - the presiding shade at the 

creation of man and vegetation. 

The callow grass between the walks was the colour of verdigris, 

a poisonous green, reminiscent of the horde of derelict humans 

that had breathed upon the soil during the summer and autumn. 

The bursting tree-buds looked strangely familiar to those who had 

botanized among the garnishings of the fish course of a forty-cent 

dinner. The sky above was of that pale aquamarine tint that hallroom poets rhyme with 'true' and 'Sue' and 'coo.' The one natural 

and frank colour visible was the ostensible green of the newly 

painted benches - a shade between the colour of a pickled cucum­

ber and that of a last year's fast-back cravenette raincoat. But, to 

the city-bred eye of Editor Westbrook, the landscape appeared a 

masterpiece. 

And now, whether you are of those who rush in, or of the gentle 

concourse that fears to tread, you must follow in a brief invasion 

of the editor's mind. 

Editor Westbrook's spirit was contented and serene. The April 

number of the Minerva had sold its entire edition before the tenth 

day of the month - a newsdealer in Keokuk had written that he 

could have sold fifty copies more if he had had 'em. The owners of 

the magazine had raised his (the editor's) salary; he had just 

installed in his home a jewel of a recently imported cook who was 

afraid of policemen; and the morning papers had published in full 

a speech he had made at a publishers' banquet. Also there were 

echoing in his mind the jubilant notes of a splendid song that his 

charming young wife had sung to him before he left his uptown 

apartment that morning. She was taking enthusiastic interest in 

her music of late, practising early and diligently. When he had 

complimented her on the improvement in her voice she had fairly 

hugged him for joy at his praise. He felt, too, the benign, tonic 

medicament of the trained nurse, Spring, tripping softly adown 

the wards of the convalescent city. 

While Editor Westbrook was sauntering between rows of park 

benches (already filling with vagrants and the guardians of lawless 

childhood) he felt his sleeve grasped and held. Suspecting that he 

was about to be panhandled, he turned a cold and unprofitable 

face, and saw that his captor was - Dawe - Shackleford Dawe, 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 3 31 

dingy, almost ragged, the genteel scarcely visible in him through 

the deeper lines of the shabby. 

While the editor is pulling himself out of his surprise, a flash­

light biography of Dawe is offered. 

He was a fiction writer, and one of Westbrook's old acquain­

tances. At one time they might have called each other old friends. 

Dawe had some money in those days, and lived in a decent apart­

ment-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 writ­

ing 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 per­

sonal 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 awk­

wardly, for the form of this phrase seemed to touch upon the 

other's changed appearance. 

'Sit down for a minute,' said Dawe, tugging at his sleeve. 'This 

is my office. I can't come to yours, looking as I do. Oh, sit down -

you won't be disgraced. Those half-plucked birds on the other 

benches will take you for a swell porch-climber. They won't know 

you are only an editor.' 

'Smoke, Shack?' said Editor Westbrook, sinking cautiously 

332 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

upon the virulent green bench. He always yielded gracefully when 

he did yield. 

Dawe snapped at the cigar as a kingfisher darts at a sunperch, or 

a girl pecks at a chocolate cream. 

'I have just - ' began the editor. 

'Oh, I know; don't finish,' said Dawe. 'Give me a match. You 

have just ten minutes to spare. How did you manage to get past 

my office-boy and invade my sanctum? There he goes now, 

throwing his club at a dog that couldn't read the "Keep off the 

Grass" signs.' 

'How goes the writing?' asked the editor. 

'Look at me,' said Dawe, 'for your answer. Now don't put on 

that embarrassed, friendly-but-honest look and ask me why I 

don't get a job as a wine agent or a cab-driver. I'm in the fight to 

a finish. I know I can write good fiction and I'll force you fellows 

to admit it yet. I'll make you change the spelling of "regrets" to 

"c-h-e-q-u-e" before I'm done with you.' 

Editor Westbrook gazed through his nose-glasses with a sweetly 

sorrowful, omniscient, sympathetic, sceptical expression - the 

copyrighted expression of the editor beleaguered by the unavailable 

contributor. 

'Have you read the last story I sent you - "The Alarum of the 

Soul"?' asked Dawe. 

'Carefully. I hesitated over that story, Shack, really I did. It had 

some good points. I was writing you a letter to send with it when 

it goes back to you. I regret - ' 

'Never mind the regrets,' said Dawe grimly. 'There's neither 

salve nor sting in 'em any more. What I want to know is why. 

Come, now; out with the good points first.' 

'The story,' said Westbrook deliberately, after a suppressed 

sigh, 'is written around an almost original plot. Characterization -

the best you have done. Construction - almost as good, except for 

a few weak joints which might be strengthened by a few changes 

and touches. It was a good story, except - ' 

'I can write English, can't I?' interrupted Dawe. 

'I have always told you,' said the editor, 'that you had a style.' 

'Then the trouble is the - ' 

'Same old thing,' said Editor Westbrook. 'You work up to your 

climax like an artist. And then you turn yourself into a photogra­

pher. I don't know what form of obstinate madness possesses you, 

Shack, but that is what you do with everything that you write. 

No, I will retract the comparison with the photographer. Now 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 333 

and then photography, in spite of its impossible perspective, man­

ages 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 liter­

ary 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 her­

self in those words or in very similar ones.' 

'Not in a six hundred nights' run anywhere but on the stage,' 

said Dawe hotly. 'I'll tell you what she'd say in real life. She'd say: 

"What! Bessie led away by a strange man? Good Lord! It's one 

trouble after another! Get my other hat, I must hurry around to 

the police-station. Why wasn't somebody looking after her, I'd 

like to know? For God's sake, get out of my way or I'll never get 

ready. Not that hat - the brown one with the velvet bows. Bessie 

must have been crazy; she's usually shy of strangers. Is that too 

much powder? Lordy! How I'm upset!" 

'That's the way she'd talk,' continued Dawe. 'People in real life 

don't fly into heroics and blank verse at emotional crises. They 

simply can't do it. If they talk at all on such occasions they draw 

from the same vocabulary that they use every day, and muddle up 

their words and ideas a little more, that's all.' 

'Shack,' said Editor Westbrook impressively, 'did you ever pick 

up the mangled and lifeless form of a child from under the fender 

of a street-car, and carry it in your arms and lay it down before the 

distracted mother? Did you ever do that and listen to the words of 

grief and despair as they flowed spontaneously from her lips?' 

'I never did,' said Dawe. 'Did you?' 

'Well, no,' said Editor Westbrook, with a slight frown. 'But I 

can well imagine what she would say.' 

'So can I,' said Dawe. 

And now the fitting time had come for Editor Westbrook to play 

the oracle and silence his opinionated contributor. It was not for an 

334 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

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

heroines of the Minerva Magazine, contrary to the theories of the 

editor thereof. 

'My dear Shack,' said he, 'if I know anything of life I know that 

every sudden, deep and tragic emotion in the human heart calls 

forth an apposite, concordant, conformable, and proportionate 

expression of feeling? How much of this inevitable accord between 

expression and feeling should be attributed to nature, and how 

much to the influence of art, it would be difficult to say. The sub­

limely 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 impor­

tance 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 elo­

quently but dumbly. He was beggared for words with which to 

formulate adequately his dissent. 

On a bench near by a frowsy loafer opened his red eyes and 

perceived that his moral support was due to a down-trodden 

brother. 

'Punch him one, Jack,' he called hoarsely to Dawe. 'Wat's he 

come makin' a noise like a penny arcade for amongst gen'lemen 

that comes in the Square to set and think?' 

Editor Westbrook looked at his watch with an affected show of 

leisure. 

'Tell me,' asked Dawe, with truculent anxiety, 'what especial 

faults in "The Alarum of the Soul" caused you to throw it down.' 

'When Gabriel Murray,' said Westbrook, 'goes to his telephone 

and is told that his fiancée has been shot by a burglar, he says - I 

do not recall the exact words, but - ' 

'I do,' said Dawe. 'He says: "Damn Central; she always cuts me 

off." (And then to his friend): "Say, Tommy, does a thirty-two 

bullet make a big hole? It's kind of hard luck, ain't it? Could you 

get me a drink from the sideboard, Tommy? No; straight; nothing 

on the side." ' 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 335 

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

ment, 'when Berenice opens the letter from her husband inform­

ing 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 recog­

nized as correct by the magazines. I've fought for it for three 

years, and I'm down to my last dollar, with two months' rent due.' 

'I have applied the opposite of your theory,' said the editor, 'in 

selecting the fiction for the Minerva Magazine. The circulation has 

gone up from ninety thousand to - ' 

'Four hundred thousand,' said Dawe. 'Whereas it should have 

been boosted to a million.' 

'You said something to me just now about demonstrating your 

pet theory.' 

'I will. If you'll give me about half an hour of your time I'll 

prove to you that I am right. I'll prove it by Louise.' 

'Your wife!' exclaimed Westbrook. 'How?' 

'Well, not exactly by her, but with her,' said Dawe. 'Now, you 

336 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

know how devoted and loving Louise has always been. She thinks 

I'm the only genuine preparation on the market that bears the old 

doctor's signature. She's been fonder and more faithful than ever, 

since I've been cast for the neglected genius part.' 

'Indeed, she is a charming and admirable life companion,' 

agreed the editor. 'I remember what inseparable friends she and 

Mrs. Westbrook once were. We are both lucky chaps, Shack, to 

have such wives. You must bring Mrs. Dawe up some evening 

soon, and we'll have one of those informal chafing-dish suppers 

that we used to enjoy so much.' 

'Later,' said Dawe. 'When I get another shirt. And now I'll tell 

you my scheme. When I was about to leave home after breakfast -

if you can call tea and oatmeal breakfast - Louise told me she was 

going to visit her aunt in Eighty-ninth Street. She said she would 

return home at three o'clock. She is always on time to a minute. It 

is now - ' 

Dawe glanced toward the editor's watch pocket. 

'Twenty-seven minutes to three,' said Westbrook, scanning his 

timepiece. 

'We have just enough time,' said Dawe. 'We will go to my flat 

at once. I will write a note, address it to her and leave it on the 

table where she will see it as she enters the door. You and I will be 

in the dining-room concealed by the portieres. In that note I'll say 

that I have fled from her for ever with an affinity who understands 

the needs of my artistic soul as she never did. When she reads it 

we will observe her actions and hear her words. Then we will 

know which theory is the correct one - yours or mine.' 

'Oh, never!' exclaimed the editor, shaking his head. 'That would 

be inexcusably cruel. I could not consent to have Mrs. Dawe's 

feelings played upon in such a manner.' 

'Brace up,' said the writer. 'I guess I think as much of her as you 

do. It's for her benefit as well as mine. I've got to get a market for 

my stories in some way. It won't hurt Louise. She's healthy and 

sound. Her heart goes as strong as a ninety-eight-cent watch. It'll 

last for only a minute, and then I'll step out and explain to her. 

You really owe it to me to give me the chance, Westbrook.' 

Editor Westbrook at length yielded, though but half willingly. 

And in the half of him that consented lurked the vivisectionist that 

is in all of us. 

Let him who has not used the scalpel rise and stand in his place. 

Pity 'tis that there are not enough rabbits and guinea-pigs to go 

around. 

O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 337 

The two experimenters in Art left the Square and hurried east­

ward 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 foun­

tain minor. Outside the railings the hollow square of crumbling 

houses, shells of a bygone gentry, leaned as if in ghostly gossip over 

the forgotten doings of the vanished quality. Sic transit gloria urbis. 

A block or two north of the Park, Dawe steered the editor again 

eastward, then, after covering a short distance, into a lofty but 

narrow flathouse burdened with a floridly over-decorated façade. 

To the fifth story they toiled, and Dawe, panting, pushed his 

latch-key into the door of one of the front flats. 

When the door opened Editor Westbrook saw, with feelings of 

pity, how meanly and meagrely the rooms were furnished. 

'Get a chair, if you can find one,' said Dawe, 'while I hunt up 

pen and ink. Hallo, what's this? Here's a note from Louise. She 

must have left it there when she went out this morning.' 

He picked up an envelope that lay on the centre-table and tore 

it open. He began to read the letter that he drew out of it; and 

once having begun it aloud he so read it through to the end. 

These are the words that Editor Westbrook heard: 

DEAR SHACKLEFORD, -

'By the time you get this I will be about a hundred miles away 

and still a-going. I've got a place in the chorus of the Occidental 

Opera Co., and we start on the road to-day at twelve o'clock. I 

didn't want to starve to death, and so I decided to make my own 

living. I'm not coming back. Mrs. Westbrook is going with me. 

She said she was tired of living with a combination phonograph, 

iceberg and dictionary, and she's not coming back, either. We've 

been practising the songs and dances for two months on the quiet. 

I hope you will be successful, and get along all right. Good-bye. 

'LOUISE.' 

Dawe dropped the letter, covered his face with his trembling 

hands, and cried out in a deep vibrating voice: 

'My God, why hast Thou given me this cup to drink? Since she is 

false, then let Thy Heaven's fairest gifts, faith and love, become the 

jesting bywords of traitors and friends!' 

Editor Westbrook's glasses fell to the floor. The fingers of one 

hand fumbled with a button on his coat as he blurted between his 

pale lips: 

338 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 

'Say, Shack, ain't that a hell of a note? Wouldn't that knock you off 

your perch, Shack? Ain't it hell, now, Shack - ain't it?' 

LIII 

Past One at Rooney's 

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

Capulet and Montague survive. There they do not fight by the 

book of arithmetic. If you but bite your thumb at an upholder of 

your opposing house you have work cut out for your steel. On 

Broadway you may drag your man along a dozen blocks by his 

nose, and he will only bawl for the watch; but in the domain of the 

East Side Tybalts and Mercutios you must observe the niceties of 

deportment to the wink of an eyelash and to an inch of elbowroom at the bar when its patrons include foes of your house and 

kin. 

So, when Eddie McManus, known to the Capulets as Cork 

McManus, drifted into Dutch Mike's for a stein of beer, and came 

upon a bunch of Montagues making merry with the suds, he began 

to observe the strictest parliamentary rules. Courtesy forbade his 

leaving the saloon with his thirst unslaked; caution steered him to 

a place at the bar where the mirror supplied the cognizance of the 

enemy's movements that his indifferent gaze seemed to disdain; 

experience whispered to him that the finger of trouble would be 

busy among the chattering steins at Dutch Mike's that night. 

Close by his side drew Brick Cleary, his Mercutio, companion of 

his perambulations. Thus they stood, four of the Mulberry Hill 

Gang and two of the Dry Dock Gang minding their P's and Q's so 

solicitously that Dutch Mike kept one eye on his customers and 

the other on an open space beneath his bar in which it was his 

custom to seek safety whenever the ominous politeness of the rival 

associations congealed into the shapes of bullets and cold steel. 

But we have not to do with the wars of the Mulberry Hills and 

the Dry Docks. We must to Rooney's, where, on the most 

blighted dead branch of the tree of life, a little pale orchid shall 

bloom. 

Overstrained etiquette at last gave way. It is not known who 

first overstepped the bounds of punctilio; but the consequences 

were immediate. Buck Malone, of the Mulberry Hills, with a 

Dewey-like swiftness, got an eight-inch gun swung round from his