American Literature of the 19th century. O’Henry

American Literature of the 19th century. O’Henry

Summary of American literature through the 19th century.

 

NEWSPAPERS appeared early in the eighteenth century. In 1704 the first Americaewspaper, The Boston News-Letter, was established. The second, The New England Courant, was started by James Franklin, in 1720. His troubles in connection with it are well known from his younger brother Benjamin’s famous “Autobiography.” In 1765, at the time of the Stamp Act, there were forty news-papers in the Colonies.

Washington Irving was the first to gain for American literature the recognition of European critics. He was born in New York city in 1783. His indeed was an international mission – to heal to some extent, by the sympathetic charm of his style and his personality, the breach between the two countries, aggravated by the second war of 1812. He became “the first literary Ambassador of the New World to the Old.” Like a loyal son of the soil, he breathed the breath of literary immortality into the traditions of his own country, as well as voyaged to England in order to write about English scenes and associations. Professor Richardson has remarked that he was “the first conspicuous American author who was neigher a Puritaor a southron; his local tone was that of New York city and the Hudson.” Quick to assimilate the customs and characteristics of other lands, he was the first to make distinctly American themes familiar to the world of letters. Returning to New York after a long residence in England, Irving gathered around him a group of friends now known as the Knickerbocker school, which comprised James Kirke Paulding (a connection of Irving by marriage, who afterwards became Secretary of the Navy, under Van Buren), and the poets Drake and Halleck. All four were Knickerbockers to the bone. Irving served as minister to Spain from 1842 to 1846. His ” Life of Columbus” and other writings on Spanish themes were followed by the “Life of Washington,” and sundry minor works.

Associated in memory with Irving are the poets Joseph Rodman Drake (1795-1820) and Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867). These two comrades made their debut in the Irving style in the “Croaker Papers,” a series of humorous and satirical verses contributed to the New York Evening Post. In the year that Irving in Europe published “The Sketch Book” (1819), Drake gave America “The Culprit Fay.” Three years before this, Bryant had produced his unique “Thanatopsis;” and Drake’s “Fay,” a delicate fairy tale of the Highlands of the Hudson, was the second best’ poem then produced in America.

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), who in early youth wrote anonymously a political satire, “The Embargo,” was the first American poet of note. His stately hymn in blank verse, “Thanatopsis,” which appeared in the North American Review in 1817, was a wonderful masterpiece of precocity, and won him an audience in England. Wordsworth is said to have learned the poem by heart, and in dignity of verse and majesty of style it is still to be recognized as one of the poetical masterpieces of the time.

As Bryant may be regarded as the pioneer American poet, and Irving as the pioneer essayist and man of letters, so James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) may be styled the first Americaovelist of true distinction. He is one of the world’s great story-tellers, whose defects of style are abundantly compensated by the invention of his narrative in plot and incident. He became, furthermore, the first voice of primeval America, of her virgin wilderness, and her aboriginal children. He created the Indian as a life-size figure of literature, impressive even if idealized. And as he originated the novel of the forest, so to a certain extent he originated the novel of the sea. In those days it was necessary for professional men of letters to adopt, as Bryant did, the bread winning employment of the newspaper. Literature as a profession did not really exist, and such giants of literary genius as Poe and Hawthorne, not to mention Lowell and others, belonged to a generation of poorly paid Bohemians. In the early forties two Philadelphia magazines began to pay their contributors with what was then thought to be a princely munificence. Godey’s Lady’s Book, which had the chief financial success among the Philadelphia magazines, had succeeded Dennie’s Port Folio in the fine personnel of contributors. It began in July, 1830, and its circulation grew several years later to 150,000 a month, largely due to its colored fashion plates. Some-what dimmed by the prismatic colors of the fashions, some of the earliest compositions of Poe, Holmes, Lydia H. Sigourney, Frances S. Osgood, Longfellow, Bayard Taylor, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, appeared in this magazine. Its chief rival was the Gentleman’s Magazine, which George R. Graham, in 1841, purchased from William E. Burton the actor, and renamed simply Graham’s Magazine. “There is one thing more,” said Burton, after concluding the sale. “I want you to take care of my young editor.” The “young editor” was Poe. Later Rufus Wilmot Griswold, of unpleasant notoriety later, sat in the editorial chair, and Lowell assisted Poe. Longfellow’s “Spanish Student,” Cooper’s “Jack Tier,” and some of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Twice-told Tales” appeared in its pages. The Cary Sisters, Charles Fenno Hoffman, Thomas Dunn English, N. P. Willis, W. W. Story, E. P. Whipple contributed to it. Among the last were Bayard Taylor and C. Godfrey Leland. N. P. Willis established the American Monthly Magazine and wrote popular books of verse and society sketches.

In the Bohemian world of literary newspapers and magazines, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) found his destiny cast. He was born in Boston, but he never belonged there, though his first volume, “Tamerlane and Other Poems,” bore on its title-page the words, “By a Bostonian.” His father was a penniless actor, and had married an actress. Early deprived of both parents, Poe was adopted by Mr. Allan, a wealthy merchant of Richmond, Va. He drank and gambled, ran in debt, indulged in perverse pride, and was finally disowned by his adoptive father, who had tried to make a soldier of him at West Point. Turning to literature for support, Poe won a prize of $100 offered by a weekly paper for a story. His contribution was “The Manuscript Found in a Bottle.” Being brought to the notice of John P. Kennedy, he was made editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, at Richmond. He married his cousin, Virginia Clenn, in 1836, and a year later went, first to New York, and then to Philadelphia, where he was editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine, afterwards Graham’s Magazine. He published “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque” (1839), which gave him renown as a prose writer. They were soon translated into French, and since that time Poe’s popularity in France has exceeded that of any other American writer. Such combination of mathematical and imaginative powers is unknown elsewhere in all the range of literature. There is an exquisite fascination and enchanting melody in his verse that seems beyond the reach of calculating art.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was born in Salem, Massachusetts. He was a classmate with Longfellow in Bowdoin College. His first books were warmly received. These half-weird but felicitously told tales marked an epoch in American literature. They were followed by his delightful tales for children from “Grandfather’s Chair,” in which he first treated New England history. Meanwhile Bancroft, the historian, then collector of customs at Boston, appointed him a weigher and gauger, a place which the Whigs permitted him to retain but two years. He also embarked in the Acadian Brook Farm experiment. “I went to live in Acadia,” he said, “and found myself up to my chin in a barn-yard.” Deserting Brook Farm, he married and took the historic gambrel-roofed house at Concord, from whence issued the tales collected in the “Mosses from an Old Manse.” His second series of “Twice-told Tales,” with their Legends of the Province House, added a fresh romantic interest to Revolutionary Boston. Almost noiselessly his shy genius had made itself recognized as a new literary force. He returned to Salem for four years as surveyor in its old Custom House. After leaving this berth, he gave forth his masterwork, “The Scarlet Letter,” in the preface to which he has told the story of that old Salem institution (1850). Hawthorne afterwards observed that “no author without a trial can see the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity in broad and simple daylight.” Yet in “The Scarlet Letter” he had touched even the gloom of Puritanism with the glamour of romance, as well as achieved a world’s masterpiece of psychology. He now retired to Lenox, Massachusetts, with Herman Melville, author of “Typee,” as almost his sole companion, and wrote the “House of Seven Gables.” In 1853 President Pierce appointed him consul at Liverpool. His Notebooks contain his observations on life in England, France, and Italy.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was a lineal successor to Irving, whom he also resembled in his equal treatment of foreign and native themes and legends alike. Such an academic influence as his, broadened and deepened by generous travel abroad to prepare him for his Harvard chair, was certainly needed in the decade after 1830. By his “Poets and Poetry of Europe” he familiarized Americans with the literature and lore of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, and even of old Anglo-Saxon days. His “Outre Mer,” a book of travel, has kept a place for itself until to-day. When he came to write his Indian legend of “Hiawatha,” his familiarity with the then little-known literature of the Northland enabled him to borrow the curious metre, style of imagery, and treatment of the Finnish epic “Kalevala.” As a critic proper, Longfellow possessed more learning than Poe, but was less truly critical, nor had he the satire and penetration of Lowell. But it is as the great poet of sympathy, as America’s most popular poet, that Longfellow must be chiefly considered; and, in the scope of this brief sketch, it is unnecessary to give a systematic account of his familiar poems. Long-fellow’s conspicuous note as a poet was from the heart, and not the head. He touched his readers with tender poems of common sentiment and elevating tendency. Perhaps his most scholarly achievement in poetry was his translation of Dante’s “Divina Commedia,” published in 1867. How deeply he lingered throughout this long labor of love under the spell of the stern Florentine, may be seen in those sonnets inspired by his work and effectively mirroring on their surface this “mediaeval miracle of song.” Long-fellow’s translation is, in many respects, such as the metrical and onomatopoetic, superior to that of Carey. He was universally regarded with affection, and England paid her first tribute of memorial honor to an American writer by placing his bust in Westminster Abbey.

James Russell Lowell (1819-1888) succeeded Longfellow in his chair at Harvard. If not of Longfellow’s rank as a poet, he was a greater critic and essayist, and had great influence for good in critical times. He was appointed Minister to England by President Hayes, where he won high and lasting favor, and received flattering degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. His “Fable for Critics,” and the “Bigelow Papers” sparkled with homely humor, wit, satire, patriotism, and idyllicism, the latter being unique in literature. It is, however, chiefly as critic and essayist that he is best known. In his three books of literacy criticism and fancy, “Fireside Travels,” “Among My Books,” “My Study Windows,” he proved himself to be America’s most scholarly critic. The old English authors Chaucer, Spenser, the dramatists of Elizabeth’s reign, attracted his attention particularly. But his catholicity of taste was also accompanied by a catholicity of subjects. In “My Garden Acquaintance,” and “A Good Word for Winter,” he displayed notable graces of style; and his paper “On a Certain Condescension of Foreigners,” was a capital “retort courteous” to the woes inflicted upon America by foreign critics, and continues to be a compensating solace even to this day.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was the most potent force in New England thought. In 1832, after his wife’s death, he gave up the Congregational ministry, for reasons of conscience, and travelled in Italy, France, and England, where began the lifelong friendship with Thomas Carlyle. His transcendental writings attracted wide attention, and he retained his popularity as a lecturer during forty-six years.

He smiled approval on the Brook Farm experiment, but took little part in it except to contribute to the Dial. But he did assist with voice and pen in the anti-slavery agitation. In 1847 he went on a second visit to England, which was rich in observation and effect on his mind. After his return his lectures on Plato, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Swedenborg, and others, were published under the title, “Representative Men” (1850). This proved popular, and still more so was his “English Traits” (1856). More readers could appreciate his judgement of great men and nations than could understand his sublime philosophy of the universe.

Emerson had but rarely contributed to periodical literature; but in 1857 a group of his friends – Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes – arranged in his parlor for the publication of the Atlantic Monthly, Lowell being editor. For some years Emerson contributed to it regularly prose and verse. His essays were collected in “The Conduct of Life” (1860); “Society and Solitude” (1864), and “Letters and Social Aims” (1876); his poems in “May-Day” (1867). He edited a collection of poetry by other authors in “Parnassus” (1874), and a selection of his own “Poems” (1876). Thereafter he wrote but little, though he revised and edited his former publications. The projected “Natural History of the Intellect,” on which he had labored for many years, was never put into a form suitable for publication. In the latter years of his life his mind and memory failed. After his death his correspondence with Carlyle was edited by Professor Charles Eliot Norton (1883).

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892), born at Haver-hill, Massachusetts, was not only the chief Quaker poet, but the clearest voice of New England country life. Bred on a farm, he found his first poetic inspiration in reading the poems of the inspired Scotch ploughman, Robert Burns. At the age of twenty he had earned enough by farm chores and shoemaking to secure some instruction at Haverhill Academy, and then became a district school-teacher. He contributed verse to the Free Press and found a lasting friend in the editor, William Lloyd Garrison, who enlisted him in the anti-slavery crusade. In 1835 Whittier was a member of the Massachusetts Legislature. From 1837 to 1839 he edited the Pennsylvania Freeman, at Philadelphia, where his office was sacked and burnt by a mob. His delicate health obliged him to return to Amesbury, Massachusetts, where with his sister he led a frugal life, contributing chiefly to the National Era, published in Washington. Gradually his books of poems made their way, and when the struggle for Kansas came, in 1856, he was recognized as the poet of freedom. These militant poems of a peace-loving Quaker helped to prepare the Northern people for the Civil War. When the Atlantic Monthly was founded,. Whittier was a frequent contributor. His verse celebrated there the emancipation of the slaves; but in his lallad of “Barbara Frietchie” he told effectively the story of the old woman of Frederick, Maryland, who waived the Union flag over the troops of Stonewall Jackson, and was gallantly spared by him. This tribute to Northern loyalty and Southern chivalry has become a national classic. His masterpiece is “Snow-Bound,” a characteristic American poem. He ranks next in popularity to Longfellow.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) was the last survivor of the Cambridge poet-group. He was the son of Rev. Abiel Holmes, a Harvard pastor, who wrote “The Annals of America.” Having graduated from Harvard in 1829, he studied law and medicine, and spent three years in Europe. He was but twenty-one years old when he made his famous protest, “Old Ironsides,” which saved the frigate Constitution from destruction, and not much older when in “The Last Leaf” he combined humor with the deepest pathos. Holmes was professor of medicine at Dartmouth College for a year, but settled in Boston in 1840, and seven years later was made professor at Harvard. Besides lecturing there and on the lyceum platform, he wrote patriotic and entertaining poems for occasions, and became the laureate of his Alma Mater, inditing forty poems in her honor. One of these, “The Boys,” is the jolliest class poem ever written. Holmes was also the bard of Boston, whose state-house he pronounced to be “the hub of our solar system.” But his lasting fame was due to the founding of the Atlantic Monthly, in 1857. His contribution was in the form of a serial, “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.” The series was renewed, in 1859, in “The Professor,” and continued, in 1873, as “The Poet at the Breakfast Table.” Novels and books of verse appeared during these years. In 1884 he published “Our Hundred Days in Europe,” telling of his observations there fifty years after his first visit. Then, in his eightieth year, the veteran renewed his conversational contributions to the Atlantic in a series called “Over the Tea-Cups,” full of the same shrewd sense and tender sentiment as “The Autocrat.” He lived to be a “Last Leaf,” yet without losing his geniality and optimism, preserving to the last the fresh spirit of youth.

Other New England writers of note were Margaret Fuller, Bronon Alcott, Lydia Maria Child, Mrs. Sigourney, philosophic and progressive teachers. The North American Review was founded in 1815, and gathered around it a brilliant circle of writers, of whom Edward Everett (1794-1865) was one of the strongest. Everett unloaded his treasures of German thought. More than a hundred articles came from his pen. In 1824 his address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard on “The Circumstances Favorable to the Progress of Literature in America,” was a prophetic precursor of Emerson’s dissertation on “The American Scholar,” delivered before the same society thirteen years later. Everett was noted for his high classical scholarship and for the careful finish of his prose style. But he was not merely a literary man; he was active in public affairs. He represented Boston in Congress for ten years, was governor of Massachusetts for three years, United States minister to England for four years, president of Harvard for three years, secretary of state in President Fillmore’s cabinet for one year, and United States senator for one year, when he resigned on account of impaired health. Yet afterwards he delivered in various parts of the country an oration on Washington for the purpose of raising a fund to purchase Mount Vernon and preserve it intact as a national memorial. His final service was in delivering the oration at the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, in November, 1863. His speeches were polished to the perfection of classical oratory, and were full of admiring contemplation and thoughtful admonition.

In the South, before the Civil War, literature was not generally favored. Men of intellectual ability there became statesmen, ministers, orators, and jurists. Yet some of these gave occasional attention to literary work, and a few devoted themselves to it almost entirely.

The principal literary figure of the Old South was William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870), who was born in Charleston, South Carolina, where his father had come from the North of Ireland, shortly after the Revolution. He wrote historical, geographical, and didactic works; but he lives only in his romances, which are numerous and stirring. Albert Pike (1809-1891) studied law, commanded a force of Cherokee Indians on the Confederate side at the battle of Pea Ridge. His “Hymns to the Gods” and other poems showed high lyric power. John Esten Cooke undertook to do for Virginia what Simms had done for South Carolina. He published the novel “Leather Stocking and Silk,” which was soon followed and surpassed by “The Virginia Comedians,” probably the best Southerovel written before the war. Others of his early stories were “The Last of the Foresters” and “Henry St. John, Gentleman.” During the Civil War Cooke served on the staff of various Confederate generals. Afterwards he retired to his farm near Winchester, and wrote biographies of Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and several novels relating to the great conflict. Among those were “Mohun: or, the Last Days of Lee and His Paladins,” and “Hilt to Hilt: or, Days and Nights in the Shenandoah.”

Paul Hamilton Hayne (1831-1886), bearing a name famous in the annals of South Carolina, was the finest poet of the South. He was a native of Charleston, and edited literary periodicals there until the war, when he served on the staff of General Pickens. His house and property were destroyed in the bombardment of Charleston, and, after the war, he settled at Copse Hill, Georgia, where he pursued literary work till his death. Among his best poems are “The Pine’s Mystery,” the ballad “The Battle of King’s Mountain,” “The Lyric of Action.” His war lyrics are thrilling, and his descriptive and meditative verses are exquisite in music and thought.

Henry Timrod (1829-1867), also born in Charleston, suffered from ill-health and poverty, yet wrote poems full of ardent devotion to the South and its lost cause. His war lyrics, grand and impetuous, won for him the title of “the Tyrtaeus of the South.” His poems were edited by P.H. Hayne.

Abram Joseph Ryan (1840-1886), born of Irish parents, at Norfolk, Virginia, was equally devoted to the Southern cause. He was a Catholic priest, and served as chaplain in the Confederate army. After the war he edited religious and literary papers in New Orleans and Knoxville, and had charge of a church at Mobile. In 1880 he published his “Poems, Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous.” He died at Louisville, Kentucky, in 1886. He is best known by his lament over the defeat of the Confederacy, “The Conquered Banner,” and the spirited tribute to the Southern leader, “The Sword of Robert Lee.”

The most remarkably original singer of the South was Sidney Lanier (1842-1881), who was chosen to write the cantata for the opening of the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia. He was descended from a long line of musicians, and distinguished his poetry by the intermingling of musical effects. He was born at Macon, Georgia, and studied at Oglethorpe College, until the war broke out, when he entered the Confederate service. He was captured on a blockade-runner, and held prisoner for five months. The hardships of war developed consumption, and the rest of his life was a courageous struggle with that disease. Though his art was too fine and high for general appreciation, Lanier is by many regarded as one of the greatest American poets.

Of minor poets, whose name is legion, it is not possible to make even a passing mention. The test of time will sift them according to their quality.

Perhaps the first of our nature-essayists was Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), who was born at Concord, Massachusetts, and died there. The son of a farmer, he was educated at Harvard, and for a time taught school. But after a while he took up his self-appointed work of minute observation of nature. He attached himself to Emerson, who always showed him friendly regard. In 1845 he built himself a hut on the shore of Walden Pond, and lived as a recluse in communion with nature. His experiences and observations were embodied in “Walden, or Life in the Woods” (1854). He had already published “A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers” (1848). Thoreau was an apostle of plain living and high thinking, and practiced what he preached. His life was a protest against all forms of superfluous comfort, and an effort to reach harmony with nature, as the basis of true happiness.

Wilson Flagg (1805-1894) also deserves a place among the Americaature-essayists. Born at Beverly, Massachusetts, he was educated at Phillips Academy, Andover, and studied medicine. He was a keen observer of outdoor life and natural phenomena. His writings were contributed to Bostoewspapers and to the Atlantic Monthly. His best-known works are “Halcyon Days,” “A Year with the Trees,” and “A Year with the Birds.”

Another man who took delight in the portrayal of outdoor nature with the pen was William Hamilton Gibson (1850-1896). He was also an artist and book-illustrator.

The most startling and debatable contribution to American literature is that made by Walt Whitman (1819-1892). It claimed to be the true voice of Democratic America; and, while the claim has been admitted by a scholarly; few here, and acknowledged by an equal number of scholarly poets in Europe, there is no evidence that it has been so accepted anywhere by the people.

Under the initials “H. H.” an American woman won high regard as a poet, and afterwards showed brilliant descriptive power in prose. Later, when her name was fully disclosed, she took up the cause of the Indian, and in history and a popular novel pleaded in his behalf with the Government and the people of the United States. Helen Fiske was born in 1831, at Amherst, Massachusetts, where her father was professor in the college. At twenty-one she was married to Captain Edward Hunt of the United States army, and wandered with him in different parts of the country. When he was killed by the explosion of a mine and her daughter died, Mrs. Hunt was plunged in the deepest grief. After some time she began to write meditative and descriptive poems, which attracted attention by their strong feeling and vivid fancy. Sometimes they took the form of parable or allegory, but they were best when they painted out-door nature. Mrs. Hunt then wrote prose descriptions, which were collected under the title “Bits of Travel,” and proved attractive to even a wider circle of readers. They abound in humor as well as pathos, and show the delicate insight of women. Other books of the same class followed. Two novels in the “No Name” series are known to have been from her pen,-“Mercy Philbrick’s Choice,” and “Hetty’s Strange History.” The stories published under the pen-name “Saxe Holme” have also been ascribed to her. After she was married to Mr. William Jackson, in Colorado, she became fully aware of the gross wrongs done to the Indians, and exerted herself to secure justice for them from the nation. For this purpose she studied the full history of Government dealings with the red men, and summed it up in “A Century of Dishonor,” making a passionate appeal for removal of the national disgrace. This was followed by the powerful story “Ramona,” written shortly before her death, in 1885. This expiring effort of her genius is perhaps its fullest illustration.

(O’Henry)

William Sydney Porter (September 11, 1862 – June 5, 1910), better known by his peame O. Henry, was an American writer. O. Henry’s short stories are known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings.

 

Biography: Early life

William Sidney Porter was born on September 11, 1862, in Greensboro, North Carolina. His middle name at birth was Sidney; he changed the spelling to Sydney in 1898. His parents were Dr. Algernon Sidney Porter (1825–1888), a physician, and Mary Jane Virginia Swaim Porter (1833–1865). They were married on April 20, 1858. When William was three, his mother died from tuberculosis, and he and his father moved into the home of his paternal grandmother. As a child, Porter was always reading, everything from classics to dime novels; his favorite works were Lane’s translation of One Thousand and One Nights, and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

Porter graduated from his aunt Evelina Maria Porter’s elementary school in 1876. He then enrolled at the Lindsey Street High School. His aunt continued to tutor him until he was fifteen. In 1879, he started working in his uncle’s drugstore and in 1881, at the age of nineteen, he was licensed as a pharmacist. At the drugstore, he also showed off his natural artistic talents by sketching the townsfolk.
Move to Texas

Porter traveled with Dr. James K. Hall to Texas in March 1882, hoping that a change of air would help alleviate a persistent cough he had developed. He took up residence on the sheep ranch of Richard Hall, James’ son, in La Salle County and helped out as a shepherd, ranch hand, cook and baby-sitter. While on the ranch, he learned bits of Spanish and German from the mix of immigrant ranch hands. He also spent time reading classic literature. Porter’s health did improve and he traveled with Richard to Austin in 1884, where he decided to remain and was welcomed into the home of the Harrells, who were friends of Richard’s. Porter took a number of different jobs over the next several years, first as pharmacist then as a draftsman, bank teller and journalist. He also began writing as a sideline.

Porter led an active social life in Austin, including membership in singing and drama groups. Porter was a good singer and musician. He played both the guitar and mandolin. He became a member of the “Hill City Quartet,” a group of young men who sang at gatherings and serenaded young women of the town. Porter met and began courting Athol Estes, then seventeen years old and from a wealthy family. Her mother objected to the match because Athol was ill, suffering from tuberculosis. On July 1, 1887, Porter eloped with Athol to the home of Reverend R. K. Smoot, where they were married.
The couple continued to participate in musical and theater groups, and Athol encouraged her husband to pursue his writing. Athol gave birth to a son in 1888, who died hours after birth, and then a daughter, Margaret Worth Porter, in September 1889. Porter’s friend Richard Hall became Texas Land Commissioner and offered Porter a job. Porter started as a draftsman at the Texas General Land Office (GLO) in 1887 at a salary of $100 a month, drawing maps from surveys and field notes. The salary was enough to support his family, but he continued his contributions to magazines and newspapers.      

In the GLO building, he began developing characters and plots for such stories as “Georgia’s Ruling” (1900), and “Buried Treasure” (1908). The castle-like building he worked in was even woven into some of his tales such as “Bexar Scrip No. 2692” (1894).

His job at the GLO was a political appointment by Hall. Hall ran for governor in the election of 1890 but lost. Porter resigned in early 1891 when the new governor was sworn in.

The same year, Porter began working at the First National Bank of Austin as a teller and bookkeeper at the same salary he had made at the GLO. The bank was operated informally and Porter was apparently careless in keeping his books and may have embezzled funds. In 1894, he was accused by the bank of embezzlement and lost his job but was not indicted.

He then worked full-time on his humorous weekly called The Rolling Stone, which he started while working at the bank. The Rolling Stone featured satire on life, people and politics and included Porter’s short stories and sketches. Although eventually reaching a top circulation of 1500, The Rolling Stone failed in April 1895 since the paper never provided an adequate income. However, his writing and drawings had caught the attention of the editor at the Houston Post.

Porter and his family moved to Houston in 1895, where he started writing for the Post. His salary was only $25 a month, but it rose steadily as his popularity increased. Porter gathered ideas for his column by loitering in hotel lobbies and observing and talking to people there. This was a technique he used throughout his writing career.

While he was in Houston, the First National Bank of Austin was audited by federal auditors and they found the embezzlement shortages that had led to his firing. A federal indictment followed and he was arrested on charges of embezzlement.    

Flight and return

Porter’s father-in-law posted bail to keep Porter out of jail. Porter was due to stand trial on July 7, 1896, but the day before, as he was changing trains to get to the courthouse, an impulse hit him. He fled, first to New Orleans and later to Honduras. While holed up in a Trujillo hotel for several months, he wrote Cabbages and Kings, in which he coined the term “banana republic” to describe the country, subsequently used to describe almost any small, unstable tropical nation in Latin America.[3] Porter had sent Athol and Margaret back to Austin to live with Athol’s parents. Unfortunately, Athol became too ill to meet Porter in Honduras as Porter had planned. When he learned that his wife was dying, Porter returned to Austin in February 1897 and surrendered to the court, pending an appeal. Once again, Porter’s father-in-law posted bail so Porter could stay with Athol and Margaret.

Athol Estes Porter died on July 25, 1897, from tuberculosis (then known as consumption). Porter, having little to say in his own defense, was found guilty of embezzlement in February 1898, sentenced to five years in prison, and imprisoned on March 25, 1898, as federal prisoner 30664 at the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio. While in prison, Porter, as a licensed pharmacist, worked in the prison hospital as the night druggist. Porter was given his own room in the hospital wing, and there is no record that he actually spent time in the cell block of the prison. He had fourteen stories published under various pseudonyms while he was in prison, but was becoming best known as “O. Henry”, a pseudonym that first appeared over the story “Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking” in the December 1899 issue of McClure’s Magazine. A friend of his in New Orleans would forward his stories to publishers, so they had no idea the writer was imprisoned. Porter was released on July 24, 1901, for good behavior after serving three years. Porter reunited with his daughter Margaret, now age 11, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Athol’s parents had moved after Porter’s conviction. Margaret was never told that her father had been in prison—just that he had been away on business.

Later life

Porter’s most prolific writing period started in 1902, when he moved to New York City to be near his publishers. While there, he wrote 381 short stories. He wrote a story a week for over a year for the New York World Sunday Magazine. His wit, characterization, and plot twists were adored by his readers, but often panned by critics. Porter married again in 1907, to childhood sweetheart Sarah (Sallie) Lindsey Coleman, whom he met again after revisiting his native state of North Carolina.

Porter was a heavy drinker, and his health deteriorated markedly in 1908, which affected his writing. In 1909, Sarah left him, and he died on June 5, 1910, of cirrhosis of the liver, complications of diabetes, and an enlarged heart. After funeral services in New York City, he was buried in the Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, North Carolina. His daughter, Margaret Worth Porter, who died in 1927, was buried next to her father.

Stories

O. Henry’s stories frequently have surprise endings. In his day, he was called the American answer to Guy de Maupassant. Both authors wrote plot twist endings, but O. Henry stories were much more playful. His stories are also known for witty narration.

Most of O. Henry’s stories are set in his own time, the early 20th century. Many take place in New York City and deal for the most part with ordinary people: clerks, policemen, waitresses, etc.

O. Henry’s work is wide-ranging, and his characters can be found roaming the cattle-lands of Texas, exploring the art of the con-man, or investigating the tensions of class and wealth in turn-of-the-century New York. O. Henry had an inimitable hand for isolating some element of society and describing it with an incredible economy and grace of language. Some of his best and least-known work is contained in Cabbages and Kings, a series of stories each of which explores some individual aspect of life in a paralytically sleepy Central American town, while advancing some aspect of the larger plot and relating back one to another.

Cabbages and Kings was his first collection of stories, followed by The Four Million. The second collection opens with a reference to Ward McAllister’s “assertion that there were only ‘Four Hundred’ people in New York City who were really worth noticing. But a wiser man has arisen—the census taker—and his larger estimate of human interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little stories of the ‘Four Million.'” To O. Henry, everyone in New York counted.

He had an obvious affection for the city, which he called “Bagdad-on-the-Subway,” and many of his stories are set there—while others are set in small towns or in other cities.

Among his most famous stories are:

“The Gift of the Magi” about a young couple who are short of money but desperately want to buy each other Christmas gifts. Unbeknownst to Jim, Della sells her most valuable possession, her beautiful hair, in order to buy a platinum fob chain for Jim’s watch; while unbeknownst to Della, Jim sells his own most valuable possession, his watch, to buy jeweled combs for Della’s hair. The essential premise of this story has been copied, re-worked, parodied, and otherwise re-told countless times in the century since it was written.

“The Ransom of Red Chief”, in which two men kidnap a boy of ten. The boy turns out to be so bratty and obnoxious that the desperate men ultimately pay the boy’s father $250 to take him back.

“The Cop and the Anthem” about a New York City hobo named Soapy, who sets out to get arrested so that he can be a guest of the city jail instead of sleeping out in the cold winter. Despite efforts at petty theft, vandalism, disorderly conduct, and “mashing” with a young prostitute, Soapy fails to draw the attention of the police. Disconsolate, he pauses in front of a church, where an organ anthem inspires him to clean up his life—and is ironically charged for loitering and sentenced to three months in prison.

“A Retrieved Reformation”, which tells the tale of safecracker Jimmy Valentine, recently freed from prison. He goes to a town bank to case it before he robs it. As he walks to the door, he catches the eye of the banker’s beautiful daughter. They immediately fall in love and Valentine decides to give up his criminal career. He moves into the town, taking up the identity of Ralph Spencer, a shoemaker. Just as he is about to leave to deliver his specialized tools to an old associate, a lawman who recognizes him arrives at the bank. Jimmy and his fiancée and her family are at the bank, inspecting a new safe, when a child accidentally gets locked inside the airtight vault. Knowing it will seal his fate, Valentine opens the safe to rescue the child. However, much to Valentine’s surprise, the lawman denies recognizing him and lets him go.

“The Duplicity of Hargraves”. A short story about a nearly destitute father and daughter’s trip to Washington, D.C.

Peame

Porter gave various explanations for the origin of his peame. In 1909 he gave an interview to The New York Times, in which he gave an account of it:

It was during these New Orleans days that I adopted my peame of O. Henry. I said to a friend: “I’m going to send out some stuff. I don’t know if it amounts to much, so I want to get a literary alias. Help me pick out a good one.” He suggested that we get a newspaper and pick a name from the first list of notables that we found in it. In the society columns we found the account of a fashionable ball. “Here we have our notables,” said he. We looked down the list and my eye lighted on the name Henry, “That’ll do for a last name,” said I. “Now for a first name. I want something short. None of your three-syllable names for me.” “Why don’t you use a plain initial letter, then?” asked my friend. “Good,” said I, “O is about the easiest letter written, and O it is.”

A newspaper once wrote and asked me what the O stands for. I replied, “O stands for Olivier, the French for Oliver.” And several of my stories accordingly appeared in that paper under the name Olivier Henry.

In the introduction to The World of O. Henry: Roads of Destiny and Other Stories (Hodder & Stoughton, 1973), William Trevor writes that when Porter was in the Ohio State Penitentiary “there was a prison guard named Orrin Henry, whom William Sydney Porter . . . immortalised as O. Henry”.

The writer and scholar Guy Davenport offers another explanation: “[T]he pseudonym that he began to write under in prison is constructed from the first two letters of Ohio and the second and last two of penitentiary [bold added].”

Legacy

The O. Henry Award is a prestigious annual prize named after Porter and given to outstanding short stories. Several schools around the country bear Porter’s pseudonym.

In 1952, a film featuring five stories, called O. Henry’s Full House, was made. The episode garnering the most critical acclaim[citatioeeded] was “The Cop and the Anthem” starring Charles Laughton and Marilyn Monroe. The other stories are “The Clarion Call”, “The Last Leaf”, “The Ransom of Red Chief” (starring Fred Allen and Oscar Levant), and “The Gift of the Magi”.

The O. Henry House and O. Henry Hall, both in Austin, Texas, are named for him. O. Henry Hall, now owned by the University of Texas, previously served as the federal courthouse in which O. Henry was convicted of embezzlement.

Porter has elementary schools named for him in Greensboro, North Carolina (William Sydney Porter Elementary) and Garland, Texas (O. Henry Elementary), as well as a middle school in Austin, Texas (O. Henry Middle School). The O. Henry Hotel in Greensboro is also named for Porter.

Early and 19th Century American Literature

Beginning with Leslie Fiedler’s groundbreaking Love and Death in the American Novel, UB’s English Department has had a long history of innovative work iineteenth-century American literary studies. From Wittgenstein and Emerson to Civil War studies, Jamesian pragmatism and Emily Dickinson, this legacy is eclectic, original and difficult to pigeon-hole. Our program encourages scholarship and teaching that defy disciplinary boundaries by incorporating history, visual studies, critical theory and philosophy and by bringing together faculty and students from English, History, American Studies, Global Gender Studies, Visual Studies, and African-American Studies in one lively community. Our graduate seminars invite exploration of the philosophical dimensions of American literature, transcontinental perspectives, Southern literature, textual studies, popular culture, theories of gender and race, and literature in its political contexts. In addition to frequent speakers in the field, the department sponsors a Graduate Americanist Group and is home to The Emily Dickinson Journal.

Beyond the department, UB’s superb Poetry Collection makes possible original research on American manuscripts and periodicals, and the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library’s Grosvenor collection, an outstanding collection from the nineteenth century, features a wide range of materials, including popular books that frequently fall below the radar of academic libraries. The city of Buffalo and the surrounding region are rich iineteenth century art, architecture, parks and historical sites.

Early and Nineteenth-century American Literature Faculty

Carrie Tirado Bramen is an Associate Professor of English and Executive Director of the UB Humanities Institute. She teaches courses iineteenth-century US literature and culture, critical race theory, and US Latino/a literature. Recent seminars include 19c Travel Writing, women’s writing, American 1890’s, critical race theory in a 19c context. She is the author of The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness (Harvard 2000), which was co-winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Prize for best first book. She is also the recipient of three teaching awards including the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. She is currently working on a book oiceness; and her most recent (and forthcoming publications) are about Leslie Fiedler; Henry James and literary pragmatism; Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ‘nice’ Jesus; and 19c Latin American travel writing to the US and the question of flirtation.

Robert Daly is Professor of English. He works on literature and philosophy, aesthetics and ethics. He has won Leverhulme and Guggenheim fellowships, five grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to direct summer seminars, and most recently the 2009 Geoffrey Marshall mentoring award from the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools. Iew and forthcoming publications, he explores how the aesthetic rearranges the conditions of our perception and how our understanding of mirror neurons, theory of mind, and speculative realism informs writing by Catharine Maria Sedgwick, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, American Puritan poets, and others. He is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Kenneth Dauber is Professor of English. His research interests focus on literature and philosophy, ordinary language criticism, theory and the Americaineteenth century. He regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses oineteenth-century American literature, the American Renaissance, Theories of American Literature, and American Exceptionalism. His publications includeRediscovering Hawthorne, The Idea of Authorship in American Literature: Democratic Poetics from Franklin to Melville, and Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein (ed. with Walter Jost).

Stacy Carson Hubbard is Associate Professor of English. Her teaching and research interests in the field of nineteenth century American literature focus on reform writings (transcendentalism, abolition, woman rights), sentimentalism, science writing, and visual art and photography. She also has interests in the 1890s that include architecture, urban design and visual culture.  She teaches courses on American Reform Writing, Domestic Literature, American Poetry, Emersonian Poetics, Earthbound Transcendentalism, and The Real and the Spectacular in America: 1880-1930. Current projects include a book-length study of the intersections of sympathy and self-reliance iineteenth century literature and culture; an essay on Emerson, Thoreau and friendship; and an essay on voice and religious authority in the career of Sojourner Truth. Professor Hubbard is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Florence Howe Award for Feminist Scholarship sponsored by the MLA.

Cristanne Miller, Professor of English and Edward Butler Chair of English, works iineteenth- and early twentieth-century poetry. Her scholarship in this period has focused primarily on Emily Dickinson but she has also written on popular Civil War poetry and Walt Whitman, and is working on a book called “Poetry After Gettysburg” that will reflect on the effects of the Civil War on major and popular poets of the late nineteenth-century. A recently completed manuscript titled “Lyric Strains: Reading Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century” gives considerable attention to antebellum patterns of writing and publishing lyric poetry, orientalist literature, and ways that the European ballad debates influence American poets in the 1840s and 1850s. Professor Miller also edits The Emily Dickinson Journal, with the assistance of two graduate students as the journal’s managing editors. Her books in this field include Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (Harvard UP 1987); Comic Power in Emily Dickinson, co- authored with Suzanne Juhasz and Martha Nell Smith (University of Texas Press, 1993); Words for the Hour: A New Anthology of American Civil War Poetry (co-edited with Faith Barrett, University of Massachusetts Press, 2005); Emily Dickinson: A Celebration for Readers, edited with Suzanne Juhasz (London and New York: Gordon & Breach, l98); The Emily Dickinson Handbook, edited with Roland Hagenbüchle and Gudrun Grabher (University of Massachusetts Press, 1998; second printing 2004); The Pearson Library of American Literature: A Custom Anthology, edited with John Bryant, Jacqueline McLendon, Robin Schulze, and David Shields (Pearson Custom Publishing, January 2003; period editor for 1865-1914, with responsibilities for selection of texts, period introduction, annotations, and author headnotes).

Neil Schmitz is Professor of English. He teaches a Civil War seminar, memoirs, speeches, fiction, poetry, photographs.  He also teaches courses on American Comedy and Humor, on the Four Greats (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, Faulkner).  His books are:  Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature and White Robe’s Dilemma: Tribal History in American LIterature.  He is presently at work on a Gertrude Stein essay, one that deals with the issue of explication. He is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Selected Recent Books on Nineteeth Century American Literature by Alumni

Breitweiser, Mitchell. National Melancholy: Mourning and Opportunity in Classic American Literature. Stanford UP, 2007.

Burnham, Michelle. Folded Selves: Colonial New England writing in the World System. University Press of New England, 2007.

Foote, Stephanie. Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century American Literature. UP Wisconsin Press, 2001.

Husband, Julie. Anti-Slavery Discourse and Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Incendiary Pictures. Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.

Joseph, Philip. American Literary Regionalism in a Global Age. Louisiana University Press, 2007.

Loebel, Thomas. The Letter and the Spirit: Justice, Politics, Theology. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2005.

Moos, Daniel. Outside America: Race, Ethnicity, and the Role of the American West in National Belonging. University Press of New England, 2005.

O’Loughlin, Jim and Julie Husband. Daily Life in the Industrial United States: 1870-1900. Greenwood, 2004.

Payne, Daniel. In Sympathy with Nature: American Nature Writing and Environmental Politics, 1620-1920. University Press of New England, 1996.

Pelletier, Kevin. Apocalyptic Sentimentalism: Love and Fear in US Antebellum Literature. U of Georgia P, forthcoming.

Petrino, Elizabeth. Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women’s Verse in American, 1820-1885. University Press of New England, 1998.

Rowe, John Carlos. Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II. Oxford UP, 2000.

Slawinski, Scott. Validating Bachelorhood: Audience, Patriarchy, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Editorship of The Monthly Magazine and American Review. Routledge, 2005.

Stancliff, Michael. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: African American Reform Rhetoric and the Rise of a Modern Nation State. Routledge, 2010.

Vallone, Lynn. Becoming Victoria. Yale UP, 2001. Co-ed, The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature. Norton UP, 2005.

Werner, Marta. Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing. (University of Michigan Press, 1995); ed. with Nicholas Lawrence, Ordinary Mysteries: The Common Journals of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, 1842-1843. (American Philosophical Association, 2006).

 

19th Century American Literature

The extraordinary richness of nineteenth century textual production invites us to examine the intersections of various practical and theoretical approaches.  We analyze lifewriting and personal letters; notebooks; short stories and novels; plays and pageants; long and short poems; philosophical, political, and scientific discourse; genres that leap across boundaries to defy conventional categorization. We are interested in the effect of the Civil War and Reconstruction on imaginative literature and on the intersection of gender and race. We attend to the ways in which popular and elite writers negotiate the demands of their real and imagined audiences. Many of us specialize in highly individualistic writers such as Emerson and Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William and Henry James. Others have a taste for foodways, for literary biography, and for scholarly editing. Our courses reflect canons old and new, well established and newer pedagogical practices. Whatever our animating passions, we engage in a disciplined consideration of the power of literature to unsettle conventional languages of nature, soul, and self, and consequent redefinitions of a distinctive sense of American dreams, nightmares, and possibilities.

O. Henry (1862-1910) – pseudonym of William Sydney Porter

Prolific American short-story writer, a master of surprise endings, who wrote about the life of ordinary people in New York City. Typical for O. Henry’s stories is a twist of plot which turns on an ironic or coincidental circumstance. Although some critics were not so enthusiastic about his work, the public loved it.

      “It was beautiful and simple as all truly great swindles are.”

William Sydney Porter (O. Henry) was born in Greenboro, North Carolina. His father, Algernon Sidney Porter, was a physician. When William was three, his mother died, and he was raised by his parental grandmother and paternal aunt. William was an avid reader, but at the age of fifteen he left school, and then worked in a drug store and on a Texas ranch. He continued to Houston, where he had a number of jobs, including that of bank clerk. After moving to Austin, Texas, in 1882, he married.

In 1884 Porter started a humorous weekly The Rolling Stone. It was at this time that he began heavy drinking. When the weekly failed, he joined the Houston Post as a reporter and columnist. In 1894 cash was found to have gone missing from the bank and O. Henry fled to Honduras. He returned to Austin the next year because his wife was dying. In 1897 he was convicted of embezzling money, although there has been much debate over his actual guilt. In 1898 he entered a penitentiary at Columbus, Ohio.

While in prison O. Henry started to write short stories to earn money to support his daughter Margaret. His first work, ‘Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking’ (1899), appeared in McClure’s Magazine. The stories of adventure in the U.S. Southwest and in Central America gained an immediately success among readers. After doing three years of the five years sentence, Porter emerged from the prison in 1901 and changed his name to O. Henry. According to some sources, he acquired the pseudonym from a warder called Orrin Henry. It also could be an abbreviation of the name of a French pharmacist, Eteinne-Ossian Henry, found in the U.S. Dispensatory, a reference work Porter used when he was in the prison pharmacy.

William Sydney Porter (O. Henry) was born in Greenboro, North Carolina. His father, Algernon Sidney Porter, was a physician. When William was three, his mother died, and he was raised by his parental grandmother and paternal aunt. William was an avid reader, but at the age of fifteen he left school, and then worked in a drug store and on a Texas ranch. He continued to Houston, where he had a number of jobs, including that of bank clerk. After moving to Austin, Texas, in 1882, he married.

In 1884 Porter started a humorous weekly The Rolling Stone. It was at this time that he began heavy drinking. When the weekly failed, he joined the Houston Post as a reporter and columnist. In 1894 cash was found to have gone missing from the bank and O. Henry fled to Honduras. He returned to Austin the next year because his wife was dying. In 1897 he was convicted of embezzling money, although there has been much debate over his actual guilt. In 1898 he entered a penitentiary at Columbus, Ohio.

While in prison O. Henry started to write short stories to earn money to support his daughter Margaret. His first work, ‘Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking’ (1899), appeared in McClure’s Magazine. The stories of adventure in the U.S. Southwest and in Central America gained an immediately success among readers. After doing three years of the five years sentence, Porter emerged from the prison in 1901 and changed his name to O. Henry. According to some sources, he acquired the pseudonym from a warder called Orrin Henry. It also could be an abbreviation of the name of a French pharmacist, Eteinne-Ossian Henry, found in the U.S. Dispensatory, a reference work Porter used when he was in the prison pharmacy.

            “He wrote love stories, a thing I have always kept free from, holding the belief that the well-known and popular sentiment is not properly matter for publication, but something to be privately handled by the alienist and the florist.” (from ‘The Plutonian Fire’)

O. Henry moved to New York City in 1902 and from December 1903 to January 1906 he wrote a story a week for the New York World, also publishing in other magazines. Henry’s first collection, CABBAGES AND KINGS, appeared in 1904. The second, THE FOUR MILLION, was published two years later and included his well-known stories ‘The Gift of the Magi’ and ‘The Furnished Room’. THE TRIMMED LAMP (1907) explored the lives of New Yorkers and included ‘The Last Leaf’ – the city itself Henry liked to call ‘Bagdad-on the-Subway.’ In one of his stories, ‘One Dollar’s Worth’, O. Henry deals with the judicial system. Judge Derwent receives a letter from an ex-convict, in which the writer, ‘Rattlesnake’ threatens his daughter and the district attorney, Littlefield. A young Mexican, Rafael Ortiz, is accused of passing a counterfeit silver dollar, made principally of lead. Rafael’s girl, Joya Treviñas, tells Littlefield that he is innocent – she was sick, and needed medicine, and that was the reason why Rafael used the dollar. Littlefield refuses to help, and Joya says that “it the life of the girl you love is ever in danger, remember Rafael Ortiz.” When he drives out of the town with Nancy Derwent, they meet Mexico Sam, the writer of the letter. He starts to shoot them from distance with his rifle. Littlefield can’t hurt him with his own gun which has only tiny pellets. Then he remembers Joya’s words, and manages hit Mexico Sam, who falls from his horse dead as a rattlesnake. Next morning in the court he tells: “‘I shot him,’ said the district attorney, ‘with Exhibit A of your counterfeiting case. Lucky thing for me – and somebody else – that it was as bad money as it was! It sliced up into slugs very nicely. Say, Kil, can’t you go down to the jacals and find where that Mexican girl lives? Miss Derwent wants to know.'”

Henry’s best known work is perhaps the much anthologized ‘The Ransom of Red Chief’ (see Howard Hawks and Nunnally Johnson), published in the collection Whirligigs in 1910. O. Henry’s humorous, energetic style shows the influence of Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce. The story tells about two kidnappers, who make off with the young son of a prominent man. They find out that the child is a real nuisance. In the end they agree to pay the boy’s father to take him back. – “Sam,” says Bill, “I suppose you’ll think I’m a renegade. but I couldn’t help it. I’m a grown person with masculine proclivities and habits of self-defense, but there is a time when all systems of egotism and predominance fail. The boy is gone. I sent him home. All is off. There was martyrs in old times,” goes on Bill, “that suffered death rather than give up the particular graft they enjoyed. None of ’em ever was subjugated to such supernatural tortures as I have been. I tried to be faithful to our articles of depredation; but there came a limit.”

HEART OF THE WEST (1907) presented tales of the Texas range. Henry published 10 collections and over 600 short stories during his life time. O. Henry’s last years were shadowed by alcoholism, ill health, and financial problems. He married in 1907 Sara Lindsay Coleman, but the marriage was not happy, and they separated a year later. O. Henry died of cirrhosis of the liver on June 5, 1910, in New York. Three more collections, SIXES AND SEVENS (1911), ROLLING STONES (1912) and WAIFS AND STRAYS (1917), appeared posthumously. In 1918 the O. Henry Memorial Awards were established to be given annually to the best magazine stories, the winners and leading contenders to be published in an annual volume.

For further reading: O. Henry, ed. by Eugene Current-Garcia (1965); O. Henry, Short Story Writer by Lucas Longo (1982); O. Henry Biography by Charles A. Smith (1992); O. Henry; A Study of the Short Fiction by Eugene Current-Garcia (1993); O. Henry, ed. by Harold Bloom (1999) – Note: The colourful story of O.Henry’s alleged bank fraud continues with an escape to New Orleans, then to Honduras, where he met one Al Jennings. He rambled in South America and Mexico on the proceeds of Jenning’s robbery, and THEN returned to stand trial wheews reached him of his wife’s illness. – Other masters of short story:

Selected works:

CABBAGES AND KINGS, 1904

THE FOUR MILLION, 1906

THE TRIMMED LAMP, 1907

HEART OF THE WEST, 1907

THE VOICE OF THE CITY, 1908

THE GENTLE GRAFTER, 1908

ROADS OF DESTINY, 1909

OPTIONS, 1909

STRICTLY BUSINESS, 1910

WHIRLIGIGS, 1910

SIXES AND SEVENS, 1911

ROLLING STONES, 1912

WAIFS AND STRAYS, 1917

O. HENRYANA, 1920

LETTERS TO LITHOPOLIS, FROM O.HENRY TO MABEL WAGNALLS, 1922

POSTSCRIPTS, 1923

THE COMPLETE WORK OF O. HENRY, 1937

O. HENRY ENCORE, 1939

O. HENRY’S NEW YORK, 1940

COMPLETE WORKS OF O HENRY, 1953 (2 vols.)

FOUR MILLION & OTHER STORIES, 1976

COLLECTED STORIES OF O. HENRY, 1986

THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF O. HENRY, 1994 b. Sept. 11, 1862, Greensboro, N.C., U.S.

 d. June 5, 1910, New York City pseudonym of WILLIAM SYDNEY PORTER American short-story writer whose tales romanticized the commonplace–in particular the life of ordinary people in New York City. His stories expressed the effect of coincidence on character through humour, grim or ironic, and often had surprise endings, a device that became identified with his name and cost him critical favour when its vogue had passed.

Porter attended a school taught by his aunt, then clerked in his uncle’s drugstore. In 1882 he went to Texas, where he worked on a ranch, in a general land office, and later as teller in the First National Bank in Austin. He began writing sketches at about the time of his marriage to Athol Estes in 1887, and in 1894 he started a humorous weekly, The Rolling Stone. When that venture failed, Porter joined the Houston Post as reporter, columnist, and occasional cartoonist.

In February 1896 he was indicted for embezzlement of bank funds. Friends aided his flight to Honduras. News of his wife’s fatal illness, however, brought him back to Austin, and lenient authorities did not press his case until after her death. When convicted, Porter received the lightest sentence possible and in 1898 he entered the penitentiary at Columbus, Ohio; his sentence was shortened to three years and three months for good behaviour. As night druggist in the prison hospital, he could write to earn money for support of his daughter Margaret. His stories of adventure in the southwest U.S. and Central America were immediately popular with magazine readers, and when he emerged from prison W.S. Porter had become O. Henry.

In 1902 O. Henry arrived in New York–his “Bagdad on the Subway.” From December 1903 to January 1906 he produced a story a week for the New York  World, writing also for magazines. His first book,  Cabbages and Kings (1904), depicted fantastic characters against exotic Honduran backgrounds. Both The Four Million (1906) and The Trimmed Lamp (1907) explored the lives of the multitude of New York in their daily routines and searchings for romance and adventure. Heart of the West (1907) presented accurate and fascinating tales of the Texas range. Then in rapid succession came The Voice of the City (1908), The Gentle Grafter (1908),  Roads of Destiny (1909), Options (1909),  Strictly Business (1910), and Whirligigs (1910).  Whirligigs contains perhaps Porter’s funniest story, “The Ransom of Red Chief.” Despite his popularity, O. Henry’s final years were marred by ill-health, a desperate financial struggle, and alcoholism. A second marriage in 1907 was unhappy. After his death three more collected volumes appeared: Sixes and Sevens (1911), Rolling Stones (1912), and Waifs and Strays (1917). Later seven fugitive stories and poems, O. Henryana (1920), Letters to Lithopolis (1922), and two collections of his early work on the Houston Post, Postscripts (1923) and O. Henry Encore (1939), were published. Foreign translations and adaptations for other art forms, including films and television, attest his universal application and appeal.

The Last Leaf

by O. Henry

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’hte of an Eighth Street “Delmonico’s,” and found their tastes in art, chicory salad and bishop sleeves so congenial that the joint studio resulted. That was in May. In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony, touching one here and there with his icy fingers. 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 California 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, gray 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-u on the side of the undertaker makes the entire pharmacopoeia 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 twice – a man for instance?” “A man?” said Sue, with a jew’s-harp twang in her voice. “Is a man worth – but, no, doctor; there is nothing of the kind.”  “Well, it is the weakness, then,” said the doctor. “I will do all that science, so far as it may filter through my efforts, can accomplish. But whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines. If you will get her to ask one question about the new winter styles in cloak sleeves I will promise you a one-in-five chance for her, instead of one in ten.”

After the doctor had gone Sue went into the workroom and cried a Japanese napkin to a pulp. Then she swaggered into Johnsy’s room with her drawing board, whistling ragtime.

 Johnsy lay, scarcely making a ripple under the bedclothes, with her face toward the window. Sue stopped whistling, thinking she was asleep.

 She arranged her board and began a pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate a magazine story. Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature.

 As Sue was sketching a pair of elegant horseshow riding trousers and a monocle of 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 little later “eleven”; and then “ten,” and “nine”; and then “eight” and “seven”, almost together.

 Sue look solicitously out of the window. What was there to count? There was only a bare, dreary yard to be seen, and the blank side of the brick house twenty feet away. An old, old ivy vine, gnarled and decayed at the roots, climbed half way up the brick wall. The cold breath of autumn had stricken its leaves from the vine until its skeleton branches clung, almost bare, to the crumbling bricks.

 “What is it, dear?” asked Sue.

 “Six,” said Johnsy, in almost a whisper. “They’re falling faster now. Three days ago there were almost a hundred. It made my head ache to count them. But now it’s easy. There goes another one. There are only five left now.”

 “Five what, dear? Tell your Sudie.”

 “Leaves. On the ivy vine. When the last one falls I must go, too. I’ve known that for three days. Didn’t the doctor tell you?”

 “Oh, I never heard of such nonsense,” complained Sue, with magnificent scorn. “What have old ivy leaves to do with your getting well? And you used to love that vine so, you naughty girl. Don’t be a goosey. Why, the doctor told me this morning that your chances for getting well real soon were – let’s see exactly what he said – he said the chances were ten to one! Why, that’s almost as good a chance as we have in New York when we ride on the street cars or walk past a new building. Try to take some broth now, and let Sudie go back to her drawing, so she can sell the editor man with it, and buy port wine for her sick child, and pork chops for her greedy self.”

 “You needn’t get any more wine,” said Johnsy, keeping her eyes fixed out the window. “There goes another. No, I don’t want any broth. That leaves just four. I want to see the last one fall before it gets dark. Then I’ll go, too.”

 “Johnsy, dear,” said Sue, bending over her, “will you promise me to keep your eyes closed, and not look out 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. “Beside, 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 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 ’til 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 with the body of an imp. Behrman was a failure in art. Forty years he had wielded the brush without getting near enough to touch the hem of his Mistress’s robe. He had been always about to paint a masterpiece, but had never yet begun it. For several years he had painted nothing except now and then a daub in the line of commerce or advertising. He earned a little by serving as a model to those young artists in the colony who could not pay the price of a professional. He drank gin to excess, and still talked of his coming masterpiece. For the rest he was a fierce little old man, who scoffed terribly at softness in any one, 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 will not bose as a model for your fool hermit-dunderhead. Vy do you allow dot silly pusiness to come in der brain of her? Ach, dot poor leetle Miss Yohnsy.”

 “She is very ill and 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 flibbertigibbet.”

 “You are just like a woman!” yelled Behrman. “Who said I will 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 away. 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 one on the vine. Still dark greeear its stem, with its serrated edges tinted with the yellow of dissolution and decay, it hung bravely from the branch some twenty feet above the ground.

“It is the last one,” said Johnsy. “I thought it would surely fall during the night. I heard the wind. It will fall to-day, and I shall die at the same time.”

 “Dear, dear!” said Sue, leaning her worn face down to the pillow, “think of me, if you won’t think of yourself. What would I do?”

 But Johnsy did not answer. The lonesomest thing in all the world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey. The fancy seemed to possess her more strongly as one by one the ties that bound her to friendship and to earth were loosed.

 The day wore away, and even through the twilight they could see the lone ivy leaf clinging to its stem against the wall. And then, with the coming of the night the north wind was again loosed, while the rain still beat against the windows and pattered down from the low Dutch eaves.

 When it was light enough Johnsy, the merciless, commanded that the shade be raised.

 The ivy leaf was still there.

Johnsy lay for a long time looking at it. And then she called to Sue, who was stirring her chicken broth over the gas stove.

 “I’ve been a bad girl, Sudie,” said Johnsy. “Something has made that last leaf stay there to show me how wicked I was. It is a sin to want to die. You may bring a 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.”

 And 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, taking 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 won. Nutrition and care now – that’s all.”

 And that afternoon Sue came to the bed where Johnsy lay, contentedly knitting a very blue and very useless woollen shoulder scarf, and put one arm around her, pillows and all.

 “I have something to tell you, white mouse,” she said. “Mr. Behrman died of pneumonia to-day in the hospital. He was ill only two days. The janitor found him 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 colors 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.”

The Gift of the Magi

by O. Henry

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 cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

There was clearly nothing left to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.

 While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the look-out for the mendicancy squad.

 In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name “Mr. James Dillingham Young.”

The “Dillingham” had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, the letters of “Dillingham” looked blurred, as though they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called “Jim” and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della. Which is all very good.

Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a grey cat walking a grey fence in a grey backyard. To-morrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn’t go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling–something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honour of being owned by Jim.

 There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pier-glass in an $8 Bat. 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 of the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty’s jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.

So now Della’s beautiful hair fell about her, rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up agaiervously 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 cluttered 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 Eight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the “Sofronie.”

 “Will you buy my hair?” asked Della.

“I buy hair,” said Madame. “Take yer hat off and let’s have a sight at the looks of it.”

 Down rippled the brown cascade.

 “Twenty dollars,” said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.

 “Give it to me quick” said Della.

Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim’s present.

 She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation–as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim’s. It was like him. Quietness and value–the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 78 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, close-lying 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 7 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 with out gloves.

Jim stepped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, 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. I his 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 a while at first.”

White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.

 For there lay The Combs–the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped for long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise-shell, 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 a while. They’re too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on.”

 The magi, as you know, were wise men–wonderfully wise men-who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.

 

The Ransom of Red Chief

by O. Henry

It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you. We were down South, in Alabama–Bill Driscoll and myself-when this kidnapping idea struck us. It was, as Bill afterward expressed it, “during a moment of temporary mental apparition”; but we didn’t find that out till later.

 

 There was a town down there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called Summit, of course. It contained inhabitants of as undeleterious and self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered around a Maypole.

 

 Bill and me had a joint capital of about six hundred dollars, and we needed just two thousand dollars more to pull off a fraudulent town-lot scheme in Western Illinois with. We talked it over on the front steps of the hotel. Philoprogenitiveness, says we, is strong in semi-rural communities therefore, and for other reasons, a kidnapping project ought to do better there than in the radius of newspapers that send reporters out in plain clothes to stir up talk about such things. We knew that Summit couldn’t get after us with anything stronger than constables and, maybe, some lackadaisical bloodhounds and a diatribe or two in the Weekly Farmers’ Budget. So, it looked good.

 

 We selected for our victim the only child of a prominent citizeamed Ebenezer Dorset. The father was respectable and tight, a mortgage fancier and a stern, upright collection-plate passer and forecloser. The kid was a boy of ten, with bas-relief freckles, and hair the colour of the cover of the magazine you buy at the news-stand when you want to catch a train. Bill and me figured that Ebenezer would melt down for a ransom of two thousand dollars to a cent. But wait till I tell you.

 

 About two miles from Summit was a little mountain, covered with a dense cedar brake. On the rear elevation of this mountain was a cave. There we stored provisions.

 

 One evening after sundown, we drove in a buggy past old Dorset’s house. The kid was in the street, throwing rocks at a kitten on the opposite fence.

 

 “Hey, little boy!” says Bill, “would you like to have a bag of candy and a nice ride?”

 

 The boy catches Bill neatly in the eye with a piece of brick.

 

 “That will cost the old man an extra five hundred dollars,” says Bill, climbing over the wheel.

 

 That boy put up a fight like a welter-weight cinnamon bear; but, at last, we got him down in the bottom of the buggy and drove away. We took him up to the cave, and I hitched the horse in the cedar brake. After dark I drove the buggy to the little village, three miles away, where we had hired it, and walked back to the mountain.

 

 Bill was pasting court-plaster over the scratches and bruises on his features. There was a fire burning behind the big rock at the entrance of the cave, and the boy was watching a pot of boiling coffee, with two buzzard tailfeathers stuck in his red hair. He points a stick at me when I come up, and says:

 

 “Ha! cursed paleface, do you dare to enter the camp of Red Chief, the terror of the plains?”

 

 “He’s all right now,” says Bill, rolling up his trousers and examining some bruises on his shins. “We’re playing Indian. We’re making Buffalo Bill’s show look like magic-lantern views of Palestine in the town hall. I’m Old Hank, the Trapper, Red Chief’s captive, and I’m to be scalped at daybreak. By Geronimo! that kid can kick hard.”

 

 Yes, sir, that boy seemed to be having the time of his life. The fun of camping out in a cave had made him forget that he was a captive himself. He immediately christened me Snake-eye, the Spy, and announced that, when his braves returned from the warpath, I was to be broiled at the stake at the rising of the sun.

 

 Then we had supper; and he filled his mouth full of bacon and bread and gravy, and began to talk. He made a during-dinner speech something like this:

 

 “I like this fine. I never camped out before; but I had a pet ‘possum once, and I was nine last birthday. I hate to go to school. Rats ate up sixteen of Jimmy Talbot’s aunt’s speckled hen’s eggs. Are there any real Indians in these woods? I want some more gravy. Does the trees moving make the wind blow? We had five puppies. What makes your nose so red, Hank? My father has lots of money. Are the stars hot? I whipped Ed Walker twice, Saturday. I don’t like girls. You dassent catch toads unless with a string. Do oxen make any noise? Why are oranges round? Have you got beds to sleep on in this cave? Amos Murray has got six toes. A parrot can talk, but a monkey or a fish can’t. How many does it take to make twelve?”

 

 Every few minutes he would remember that he was a pesky redskin, and pick up his stick rifle and tiptoe to the mouth of the cave to rubber for the scouts of the hated paleface. Now and then he would let out a warwhoop that made Old Hank the Trapper, shiver. That boy had Bill terrorized from the start.

 

 “Red Chief,” says I to the kid, “would you like to go home?”

 

 “Aw, what for?” says he. “I don’t have any fun at home. I hate to go to school. I like to camp out. You won’t take me back home again, Snake-eye, will you?”

 

 “Not right away,” says I. “We’ll stay here in the cave a while.”

 

 “All right!” says he. “That’ll be fine. I never had such fun in all my life.”

 

 We went to bed about eleven o’clock. We spread down some wide blankets and quilts and put Red Chief between us. We weren’t afraid he’d run away. He kept us awake for three hours, jumping up and reaching for his rifle and screeching: “Hist! pard,” in mine and Bill’s ears, as the fancied crackle of a twig or the rustle of a leaf revealed to his young imagination the stealthy approach of the outlaw band. At last, I fell into a troubled sleep, and dreamed that I had been kidnapped and chained to a tree by a ferocious pirate with red hair.

 

 Just at daybreak, I was awakened by a series of awful screams from Bill. They weren’t yells, or howls, or shouts, or whoops, or yawps, such as you’d expect from a manly set of vocal organs–they were simply indecent, terrifying, humiliating screams, such as women emit when they see ghosts or caterpillars. It’s an awful thing to hear a strong, desperate, fat man scream incontinently in a cave at daybreak.

 

 I jumped up to see what the matter was. Red Chief was sitting on Bill’s chest, with one hand twined in Bill’s hair. In the other he had the sharp case-knife we used for slicing bacon; and he was industriously and realistically trying to take Bill’s scalp, according to the sentence that had been pronounced upon him the evening before.

 

 I got the knife away from the kid and made him lie down again. But, from that moment, Bill’s spirit was broken. He laid down on his side of the bed, but he never closed an eye again in sleep as long as that boy was with us. I dozed off for a while, but along toward sun-up I remembered that Red Chief had said I was to be burned at the stake at the rising of the sun. I wasn’t nervous or afraid; but I sat up and lit my pipe and leaned against a rock.

 

 “What you getting up so soon for, Sam?” asked Bill.

 

 “Me?” says I. “Oh, I got a kind of a pain in my shoulder. I thought sitting up would rest it.”

 

 “You’re a liar!” says Bill. “You’re afraid. You was to be burned at sunrise, and you was afraid he’d do it. And he would, too, if he could find a match. Ain’t it awful, Sam? Do you think anybody will pay out money to get a little imp like that back home?”

 

 “Sure,” said I. “A rowdy kid like that is just the kind that parents dote on. Now, you and the Chief get up and cook breakfast, while I go up on the top of this mountain and reconnoitre.”

 

 I went up on the peak of the little mountain and ran my eye over the contiguous vicinity. Over toward Summit I expected to see the sturdy yeomanry of the village armed with scythes and pitchforks beating the countryside for the dastardly kidnappers. But what I saw was a peaceful landscape dotted with one man ploughing with a dun mule. Nobody was dragging the creek; no couriers dashed hither and yon, bringing tidings of no news to the distracted parents. There was a sylvan attitude of somnolent sleepiness pervading that section of the external outward surface of Alabama that lay exposed to my view. “Perhaps,” says I to myself, “it has not yet been discovered that the wolves have borne away the tender lambkin from the fold. Heaven help the wolves!” says I, and I went down the mountain to breakfast.

 

 When I got to the cave I found Bill backed up against the side of it, breathing hard, and the boy threatening to smash him with a rock half as big as a cocoanut.

 

 “He put a red-hot boiled potato down my back,” explained Bill, “and then mashed it with his foot; and I boxed his ears. Have you got a gun about you, Sam?”

 

 I took the rock away from the boy and kind of patched up the argument. “I’ll fix you,” says the kid to Bill. “No man ever yet struck the Red Chief but what he got paid for it. You better beware!”

 

 After breakfast the kid takes a piece of leather with strings wrapped around it out of his pocket and goes outside the cave unwinding it.

 

 “What’s he up to now?” says Bill, anxiously. “You don’t think he’ll run away, do you, Sam?”

 

 “No fear of it,” says I. “He don’t seem to be much of a home body. But we’ve got to fix up some plan about the ransom. There don’t seem to be much excitement around Summit on account of his disappearance; but maybe they haven’t realized yet that he’s gone. His folks may think he’s spending the night with Aunt Jane or one of the neighbours. Anyhow, he’ll be missed to-day. To-night we must get a message to his father demanding the two thousand dollars for his return.”

 

 Just then we heard a kind of war-whoop, such as David might have emitted when he knocked out the champion Goliath. It was a sling that Red Chief had pulled out of his pocket, and he was whirling it around his head.

 

 I dodged, and heard a heavy thud and a kind of a sigh from Bill, like a horse gives out when you take his saddle off. A niggerhead rock the size of an egg had caught Bill just behind his left ear. He loosened himself all over and fell in the fire across the frying pan of hot water for washing the dishes. I dragged him out and poured cold water on his head for half an hour.

 

 By and by, Bill sits up and feels behind his ear and says: “Sam, do you know who my favourite Biblical character is?”

 

 “Take it easy,” says I. “You’ll come to your senses presently.”

 

 “King Herod,” says he. “You won’t go away and leave me here alone, will you, Sam?”

 

 I went out and caught that boy and shook him until his freckles rattled.

 

 “If you don’t behave,” says I, “I’ll take you straight home. Now, are you going to be good, or not?”

 

 “I was only funning,” says he sullenly. “I didn’t mean to hurt Old Hank. But what did he hit me for? I’ll behave, Snake-eye, if you won’t send me home, and if you’ll let me play the Black Scout to-day.”

 

 “I don’t know the game,” says I. “That’s for you and Mr. Bill to decide. He’s your playmate for the day. I’m going away for a while, on business. Now, you come in and make friends with him and say you are sorry for hurting him, or home you go, at once.”

 

 I made him and Bill shake hands, and then I took Bill aside and told him I was going to Poplar Cove, a little village three miles from the cave, and find out what I could about how the kidnapping had been regarded in Summit. Also, I thought it best to send a peremptory letter to old man Dorset that day, demanding the ransom and dictating how it should be paid.

 

 “You know, Sam,” says Bill, “I’ve stood by you without batting an eye in earthquakes, fire and flood–in poker games, dynamite outrages, police raids, train robberies and cyclones. I never lost my nerve yet till we kidnapped that two-legged skyrocket of a kid. He’s got me going. You won’t leave me long with him, will you, Sam?”

 

 “I’ll be back some time this afternoon,” says I. “You must keep the boy amused and quiet till I return. And now we’ll write the letter to old Dorset.”

 

 Bill and I got paper and pencil and worked on the letter while Red Chief, with a blanket wrapped around him, strutted up and down, guarding the mouth of the cave. Bill begged me tearfully to make the ransom fifteen hundred dollars instead of two thousand. “I ain’t attempting,” says he, “to decry the celebrated moral aspect of parental affection, but we’re dealing with humans, and it ain’t human for anybody to give up two thousand dollars for that forty-pound chunk of freckled wildcat. I’m willing to take a chance at fifteen hundred dollars. You can charge the difference up to me.”

 

 So, to relieve Bill, I acceded, and we collaborated a letter that ran this way:

 

Ebenezer Dorset, Esq.:

 

 We have your boy concealed in a place far from Summit. It is useless for you or the most skilful detectives to attempt to find him. Absolutely, the only terms on which you can have him restored to you are these: We demand fifteen hundred dollars in large bills for his return; the money to be left at midnight to-night at the same spot and in the same box as your reply–as hereinafter described. If you agree to these terms, send your answer in writing by a solitary messenger to-night at half-past eight o’clock. After crossing Owl Creek, on the road to Poplar Cove, there are three large trees about a hundred yards apart, close to the fence of the wheat field on the right-hand side. At the bottom of the fence-post, opposite the third tree, will be found a small pasteboard box.

 

 The messenger will place the answer in this box and return immediately to Summit.

 

 If you attempt any treachery or fail to comply with our demand as stated, you will never see your boy again.

 

 If you pay the money as demanded, he will be returned to you safe and well within three hours. These terms are final, and if you do not accede to them no further communication will be attempted.

 

 TWO DESPERATE MEN.

 

 I addressed this letter to Dorset, and put it in my pocket. As I was about to start, the kid comes up to me and says:

 

 “Aw, Snake-eye, you said I could play the Black Scout while you was gone.”

 

 “Play it, of course,” says I. “Mr. Bill will play with you. What kind of a game is it?”

 

 “I’m the Black Scout,” says Red Chief, “and I have to ride to the stockade to warn the settlers that the Indians are coming. I ‘m tired of playing Indian myself. I want to be the Black Scout.”

 

 “All right,” says I. “It sounds harmless to me. I guess Mr. Bill will help you foil the pesky savages.”

 

 “What am I to do?” asks Bill, looking at the kid suspiciously.

 

 “You are the hoss,” says Black Scout. “Get down on your hands and knees. How can I ride to the stockade without a hoss?”

 

 “You’d better keep him interested,” said I, “till we get the scheme going. Loosen up.”

 

 Bill gets down on his all fours, and a look comes in his eye like a rabbit’s when you catch it in a trap.

 

 ” How far is it to the stockade, kid? ” he asks, in a husky manner of voice.

 

 “Ninety miles,” says the Black Scout. “And you have to hump yourself to get there on time. Whoa, now!”

 

 The Black Scout jumps on Bill’s back and digs his heels in his side.

 

 “For Heaven’s sake,” says Bill, “hurry back, Sam, as soon as you can. I wish we hadn’t made the ransom more than a thousand. Say, you quit kicking me or I ’11 get up and warm you good.”

 

 I walked over to Poplar Cove and sat around the postoffice and store, talking with the chawbacons that came in to trade. One whiskerand says that he hears Summit is all upset on account of Elder Ebenezer Dorset’s boy having been lost or stolen. That was all I wanted to know. I bought some smoking tobacco, referred casually to the price of black-eyed peas, posted my letter surreptitiously and came away. The postmaster said the mail-carrier would come by in an hour to take the mail on to Summit.

 

 When I got back to the cave Bill and the boy were not to be found. I explored the vicinity of the cave, and risked a yodel or two, but there was no response.

 

 So I lighted my pipe and sat down on a mossy bank to await developments.

 

 In about half an hour I heard the bushes rustle, and Bill wabbled out into the little glade in front of the cave. Behind him was the kid, stepping softly like a scout, with a broad grin on his face. Bill stopped, took off his hat and wiped his face with a red handkerchief. The kid stopped about eight feet behind him.

 

 “Sam,” says Bill, “I suppose you’ll think I’m a renegade, but I couldn’t help it. I’m a grown person with masculine proclivities and habits of self-defence, but there is a time when all systems of egotism and predominance fail. The boy is gone. I have sent him home. All is off. There was martyrs in old times,” goes on Bill, “that suffered death rather than give up the particular graft they enjoyed. None of ’em ever was subjugated to such supernatural tortures as I have been. I tried to be faithful to our articles of depredation; but there came a limit.”

 

 “What’s the trouble, Bill?” I asks him.

 

 “I was rode,” says Bill, “the ninety miles to the stockade, not barring an inch. Then, when the settlers was rescued, I was given oats. Sand ain’t a palatable substitute. And then, for an hour I had to try to explain to him why there was nothin’ in holes, how a road can run both ways and what makes the grass green. I tell you, Sam, a human can only stand so much. I takes him by the neck of his clothes and drags him down the mountain. On the way he kicks my legs black-and-blue from the knees down; and I’ve got two or three bites on my thumb and hand cauterized.

 

 “But he’s gone”–continues Bill–“gone home. I showed him the road to Summit and kicked him about eight feet nearer there at one kick. I’m sorry we lose the ransom; but it was either that or Bill Driscoll to the madhouse.”

 

 Bill is puffing and blowing, but there is a look of ineffable peace and growing content on his rose-pink features.

 

 “Bill,” says I, “there isn’t any heart disease in your family, is there?”

 

 “No,” says Bill, “nothing chronic except malaria and accidents. Why?”

 

 “Then you might turn around,” says I, “and have a look behind you.”

 

 Bill turns and sees the boy, and loses his complexion and sits down plump on the ground and begins to pluck aimlessly at grass and little sticks. For an hour I was afraid for his mind. And then I told him that my scheme was to put the whole job through immediately and that we would get the ransom and be off with it by midnight if old Dorset fell in with our proposition. So Bill braced up enough to give the kid a weak sort of a smile and a promise to play the Russian in a Japanese war with him as soon as he felt a little better.

 

 I had a scheme for collecting that ransom without danger of being caught by counterplots that ought to commend itself to professional kidnappers. The tree under which the answer was to be left–and the money later on–was close to the road fence with big, bare fields on all sides. If a gang of constables should be watching for any one to come for the note they could see him a long way off crossing the fields or in the road. But no, sirree! At half-past eight I was up in that tree as well hidden as a tree toad, waiting for the messenger to arrive.

 

 Exactly on time, a half-grown boy rides up the road on a bicycle, locates the pasteboard box at the foot of the fencepost, slips a folded piece of paper into it and pedals away again back toward Summit.

 

 I waited an hour and then concluded the thing was square. I slid down the tree, got the note, slipped along the fence till I struck the woods, and was back at the cave in another half an hour. I opened the note, got near the lantern and read it to Bill. It was written with a pen in a crabbed hand, and the sum and substance of it was this:

 

 Two Desperate Men.

 

 Gentlemen: I received your letter to-day by post, in regard to the ransom you ask for the return of my son. I think you are a little high in your demands, and I hereby make you a counter-proposition, which I am inclined to believe you will accept. You bring Johnny home and pay me two hundred and fifty dollars in cash, and I agree to take him off your hands. You had better come at night, for the neighbours believe he is lost, and I couldn’t be responsible for what they would do to anybody they saw bringing him back.

 

Very respectfully,

EBENEZER DORSET.

 

 “Great pirates of Penzance!” says I; “of all the impudent–”

 

 But I glanced at Bill, and hesitated. He had the most appealing look in his eyes I ever saw on the face of a dumb or a talking brute.

 

 “Sam,” says he, “what’s two hundred and fifty dollars, after all? We’ve got the money. One more night of this kid will send me to a bed in Bedlam. Besides being a thorough gentleman, I think Mr. Dorset is a spendthrift for making us such a liberal offer. You ain’t going to let the chance go, are you?”

 

 “Tell you the truth, Bill,” says I, “this little he ewe lamb has somewhat got on my nerves too. We’ll take him home, pay the ransom and make our get-away.”

 

 We took him home that night. We got him to go by telling him that his father had bought a silver-mounted rifle and a pair of moccasins for him, and we were going to hunt bears the next day.

 

 It was just twelve o’clock when we knocked at Ebenezer’s front door. Just at the moment when I should have been abstracting the fifteen hundred dollars from the box under the tree, according to the original proposition, Bill was counting out two hundred and fifty dollars into Dorset’s hand.

 

 When the kid found out we were going to leave him at home he started up a howl like a calliope and fastened himself as tight as a leech to Bill’s leg. His father peeled him away gradually, like a porous plaster.

 

 “How long can you hold him?” asks Bill.

 

 “I’m not as strong as I used to be,” says old Dorset, “but I think I can promise you ten minutes.”

 

 “Enough,” says Bill. “In ten minutes I shall cross the Central, Southern and Middle Western States, and be legging it trippingly for the Canadian border.”

 

 And, as dark as it was, and as fat as Bill was, and as good a runner as I am, he was a good mile and a half out of summit before I could catch up with him.

A Blackjack Bargainer

by O. Henry.

The most disreputable thing in Yancey Goree’s law office was Goree himself, sprawled in his creakv old arm- chair. The rickety little office, built of red brick, was set flush with the street — the main street of the town of Bethel.

 

 Bethel rested upon the foot-hills of the Blue Ridge. Above it the mountains were piled to the sky. Far below it the turbid Catawba gleamed yellow along its disconsolate valley.

 

 The June day was at its sultriest hour. Bethel dozed in the tepid shade. Trade was not. It was so still that Goree, reclining in his chair, distinctly heard the clicking of the chips in the grand-jury room, where the “court- house gang” was playing poker. From the open back door of the office a well-worn path meandered across the grassy lot to the court-house. The treading out of that path had cost Goree all he ever had — first inheritance of a few thousand dollars, next the old family home, and, latterly the last shreds of his self-respect and manhood. The “gang” had cleaned him out. The broken gambler had turned drunkard and parasite; he had lived to see this day come when the men who had stripped him denied him a seat at the game. His word was no longer to be taken. The daily bouts at cards had arranged itself accordingly, and to him was assigned the ignoble part of the onlooker. The sheriff, the county clerk, a sportive deputy, a gay attorney, and a chalk-faced man hailing “from the valley,” sat at table, and the sheared one was thus tacitly advised to go and grow more wool.

 

 Soon wearying of his ostracism, Goree had departed for his office, muttering to himself as he unsteadily tra- versed the unlucky pathway. After a drink of corn whiskey from a demijohn under the table, he had flung himself into the chair, staring, in a sort of maudlin apathy, out at the mountains immersed in the summer haze. The little white patch he saw away up on the side of Blackjack was Laurel, the village near which he had been born and bred. There, also, was the birthplace of the feud between the Gorees and the Coltranes. Now no direct heir of the Gorees survived except this plucked and singed bird of misfortune. To the Coltranes, also, but one male supporter was left — Colonel Abner Col- trane, a man of substance and standing, a member of the State Legislature, and a contemporary with Goree’s father. The feud had been a typical one of the region; it had left a red record of hate, wrong and slaughter. But Yancey Goree was not thinking of feuds. His befuddled brain was hopelessly attacking the problem of the future maintenance of himself and his favourite follies. Of late, old friends of the family had seen to it that he had whereof to eat and a place to sleep — but whiskey they would not buy for him, and he must have whiskey. His law business was extinct; no case had been intrusted to him in two years. He had been a borrower and a sponge, and it seemed that if he fell no lower it would be from lack of opportunity. One more chance — he was saying to himself — if he had one more stake at the game, he thought he could win; but he had nothing left to sell, and his credit was more than exhausted.

 

 He could not help smiling, even in his misery, as he thought of the man to whom, six months before, he had sold the old Goree homestead. There had come from “back yan'” in the mountains two of the strangest creatures, a maamed Pike Garvey and his wife. “Back yan’,” with a wave of the hand toward the hills, was understood among the mountaineers to designate the remotest fastnesses, the unplumbed gorges, the haunts of lawbreakers, the wolf’s den, and the boudoir of the bear. In the cabin far up on Blackjack’s shoulder, in the wildest part of these retreats, this odd couple had lived for twenty years. They had neither dog nor children to mitigate the heavy silence of the hills. Pike Garvey was little known in the settlements, but all who had dealt with him pronounced him “crazy as a loon.” He acknowledged no occupation save that of a squirrel hunter, but he “moonshined” occasionally by way of diversion. Once the “revenues” had dragged him from his lair, fighting silently and desperately like a terrier, and he had been sent to state’s prison for two years. Released, he popped back into his hole like an angry weasel.

 

 Fortune, passing over many anxious wooers, made a freakish flight into Blackjack’s bosky pockets to smile upon Pike and his faithful partner.

 

 One day a party of spectacled, knickerbockered, and altogether absurd prospectors invaded the vicinity of the Garvey’s cabin. Pike lifted his squirrel rifle off the hooks and took a shot at them at long range on the chance of their being revenues. Happily he missed, and the unconscious agents of good luck drew nearer, disclosing their innocence of anything resembling law or justice. Later on, they offered the Garveys an enormous quantity of ready, green, crisp money for their thirty-acre patch of cleared land, mentioning, as an excuse for such a mad action, some irrelevant and inadequate nonsense about a bed of mica underlying the said property.

 

 When the Garveys became possessed of so many dol- lars that they faltered in computing them, the deficiencies of life on Blackjack began to grow prominent. Pike began to talk of new shoes, a hogshead of tobacco to set in the corner, a new lock to his rifle; and, leading Martella to a certain spot on the mountain-side, he pointed out to her how a small cannon — doubtless a thing not beyond the scope of their fortune in price — might be planted so as to command and defend the sole accessible trail to the cabin, to the confusion of revenues and meddling strangers forever.

 

 But Adam reckoned without his Eve. These things represented to him the applied power of wealth, but there slumbered in his dingy cabin an ambition that soared far above his primitive wants. Somewhere in Mrs. Garvey’s bosom still survived a spot of femininity unstarved by twenty years of Blackjack. For so long a time the sounds in her ears had been the scaly-barks dropping in the woods at noon, and the wolves singing among the rocks at night, and it was enough to have purged her of vanities. She had grown fat and sad and yellow and dull. But when the means came, she felt a rekindled desire to assume the perquisites of her sex — to sit at tea tables; to buy futile things; to whitewash the hideous veracity of life with a little form and ceremony. So she coldly vetoed Pike’s proposed system of fortifica- tions, and announced that thev would descend upon the world, and gyrate socially.

 

 And thus, at length, it was decided, and the thing done. The village of Laurel was their compromise between Mrs. Garvey’s preference for one of the large valley towns and Pike’s hankering for primeval solitudes. Laurel yielded a halting round of feeble social distractions omportable with Martella’s ambitions, and was not entirely without recommendation to Pike, its contiguity to the mountains presenting advantages for sudden retreat in case fashionable society should make it advisable.

 

 Their descent upon Laurel had been coincident with Yancey Goree’s feverish desire to convert property into cash, and they bought the old Goree homestead, paying four thousand dollars ready money into the spendthrift’s shaking hands.

 

 Thus it happened that while the disreputable last of the Gorees sprawled in his disreputable office, at the end of his row, spurned by the cronies whom he had gorged, strangers dwelt in the halls of his fathers.

 

 A cloud of dust was rolling, slowly up the parched street, with something travelling in the midst of it. A little breeze wafted the cloud to one side, and a new, brightly painted carryall, drawn by a slothful gray horse, became visible. The vehicle deflected from the middle of the street as it neared Goree’s office, and stopped in the gutter directly in front of his door.

 

 On the front seat sat a gaunt, tall man, dressed in black broadcloth, his rigid hands incarcerated in yellow kid gloves. On the back seat was a lady who triumphed over the June heat. Her stout form was armoured in a skintight silk dress of the description known as “change- able,” being a gorgeous combination of shifting hues. She sat erect, waving a much-omamented fan, with her eyes fixed stonily far down the street. However Martella Garvey’s heart might be rejoicing at the pleasures of her new life, Blackjack had done his work with her exterior. He had carved her countenance to the image of emptiness and inanity; had imbued her with the stolidity of his crags, and the reserve of his hushed interiors. She always seemed to hear, whatever her surroundings were, the scaly-barks falling and pattering down the mountain- side. She could always hear the awful silence of Black- jack sounding through the stillest of nights.

 

 Goree watched this solemn equipage, as it drove to his door, with only faint interest; but when the lank driver wrapped the reins about his whip, awkwardly descended, and stepped into the office, he rose unsteadily to receive him, recognizing Pike Garvey, the new, the transformed, the recently civilized.

 

 The mountaineer took the chair Goree offered him. They who cast doubts upon Garvey’s soundness of mind had a strong witness in the man’s countenance. His face was too long, a dull saffron in hue, and immobile as a statue’s. Pale-blue, unwinking round eyes without lashes added to the singularity of his gruesome visage. Goree was at a loss to account for the visit.

 

 “Everything all right at Laurel, Mr. Garvey?” he inquired.

 

 “Everything all right, sir, and mighty pleased is Missis Garvey and me with the property. Missis Garvey likes yo’ old place, and she likes the neighbourhood. Society is what she ‘lows she wants, and she is gettin’ of it. The Rogerses, the Hapgoods, the Pratts and the Troys hev been to see Missis Garvey, and she hev et meals to most of thar houses. The best folks hev axed her to differ’nt kinds of doin’s. I cyan’t say, Mr. Goree, that sech things suits me — fur me, give me them thar.” Garvey’s huge, yellow-gloved hand flourished in the direction of the mountains. “That’s whar I b’long, ‘mongst the wild honey bees and the b’ars. But that ain’t what I come fur to say, Mr. Goree. Thar’s somethin’ you got what me and Missis Garvey wants to buy.”

 

 “Buy!” echoed Goree. “From me?” Then he laughed harshly. “I reckon you are mistaken about that. I reckon you are mistaken about that. I sold out to you, as you yourself expressed it, ‘lock, stock and barrel.’ There isn’t even a ramrod left to sell.”

 

 “You’ve got it; and we ‘uns want it. ‘Take the money,’ says Missis Garvey, ‘and buy it fa’r and squared’.'”

 

 Goree shook his head. “The cupboard’s bare,” he said.

 

 “We’ve riz,” pursued the mountaineer, undetected from his object, “a heap. We was pore as possums, and now we could hev folks to dinner every day. We been recognized, Missis Garvey says, by the best society. But there’s somethin’ we need we ain’t got. She says it ought to been put in the ‘ventory ov the sale, but it tain’t thar. ‘Take the money, then,’ says she, ‘and buy it fa’r and squar’.”‘

 

 “Out with it,” said Goree, his racked nerves growing impatient.

 

 Garvey threw his slouch bat upon the table, and leaned forward, fixing his unblinking eves upon Goree’s.

 

 “There’s a old feud,” he said distinctly and slowly, “‘tween you ‘uns and the Coltranes.”

 

 Goree frowned ominously. To speak of his feud to a feudist is a serious breach of the mountain etiquette. The man from “back yan'” knew it as well as the lawyer did.

 

 “Na offense,” he went on “but purely in the way of business. Missis Garvey hev studied all about feuds. Most of the quality folks in the mountains hev ’em. The Settles and the Goforths, the Rankins and the Boyds, the Silers and the Galloways, hev all been cyarin’ on feuds f’om twenty to a hundred year. The last man to drap was when yo’ uncle, Jedge Paisley Goree, ‘journed co’t and shot Len Coltrane f’om the bench. Missis Garvey and me, we come f’om the po’ white trash. Nobody wouldn’t pick a feud with we ‘uns, no mo’n with a fam’ly of tree-toads. Quality people everywhar, says Missis Garvey, has feuds. We ‘uns ain’t quality, but we’re uyin’ into it as fur as we can. ‘Take the money, then,’ says Missis Garvey, ‘and buy Mr. Goree’s feud, fa’r and squar’.'”

 

 The squirrel hunter straightened a leg half across the room, drew a roll of bills from his pocket, and threw them on the table.

 

 “Thar’s two hundred dollars, Mr. Goree; what you would call a fa’r price for a feud that’s been ‘lowed to run down like yourn hev. Thar’s only you left to cyar’ on yo’ side of it, and you’d make mighty po’ killin’. I’ll take it off yo’ hands, and it’ll set me and Missis Garvey up among the quality. Thar’s the money.”

 

 The little roll of currency on the table slowly untwisted itself, writhing and jumping as its folds relaxed. In the silence that followed Garvey’s last speech the rattling of the poker chips in the court-house could be plainly heard. Goree knew that the sheriff had just won a pot, for the subdued whoop with which he always greeted a victory floated across the sqquare upon the crinkly heat waves. Beads of moisture stood on Goree’s brow. Stooping, he drew the wicker-covered demijohn from under the table, and filled a tumbler from it.

 

 “A little corn liquor, Mr. Garvey? Of course you are joking about what you spoke of? Opens quite a new market, doesn’t it? Feuds. Prime, two-fifty to three. Feuds, slightly damaged — two hundred, I believe you said, Mr. Garvey?”

 

 Goree laughed self-consciously.

 

 The mountaineer took the glass Goree handed him, and drank the whisky without a tremor of the lids of his staring eyes. The lawyer applauded the feat by a look of envious admiration. He poured his own drink, and took it like a drunkard, by gulps, and with shudders at the smell and taste.

 

 “Two hundred,” repeated Garvey. “Thar’s the money.”

 

 A sudden passion flared up in Goree’s brain. He struck the table with his fist. One of the bills flipped over and touched his hand. He flinched as if something had stung him.

 

 “Do you come to me,” he shouted, “seriously with such a ridiculous, insulting, darned-fool proposition?”

 

 “It’s fa’r and squar’,” said the squirrel hunter, but he reached out his hand as if to take back the money; and then Goree knew that his own flurry of rage had not been from pride or resentment, but from anger at himself, knowing that he would set foot in the deeper depths that were being opened to him. He turned in an instant from an outraged gentleman to an anxious chafferer recom- mending his goods.

 

 “Don’t be in a hurry, Garvey,” he said, his face crimson and his speech thick. “I accept your p-p-proposition, though it’s dirt cheap at two hundred. A t-trade’s all right when both p-purchaser and b-buyer are s-satisfied. Shall I w-wrap it up for you, Mr. Garvey?”

 

 Garvey rose, and shook out his broadcloth. “Missis Garvev will be pleased. You air out of it, and it stands Coltrane and Garvey. Just a scrap ov writin’, Mr. Goree, you bein’ a lawyer, to show we traded.”

 

 Goree seized a sheet of paper and a pen. The money was clutched in his moist hand. Everything else sud- denly seemed to grow trivial and light.

 

 “Bill of sale, by all means. ‘Right, title, and interest in and to’ . . . ‘forever warrant and — ‘ No, Garvey, we’ll have to leave out that ‘defend,'” said Goree with a loud laugh. “You’ll have to defend this title yourself.”

 

 The mountaineer received the amazing screed that the lawyer handed him, folded it with immense labour, and laced it carefully in his pocket.

 

 Goree was standing near the window. “Step here, said, raising his finger, “and I’ll show you your recently purchased enemy. There he goes, down the other side of the street.”

 

 The mountaineer crooked his long frame to look through the window in the direction indicated by the other. Colonel Abner Coltrane, an erect, portly gentleman of about fifty, wearing the inevitable long, double-breasted frock coat of the Southern lawmaker, and an old high silk hat, was passing on the opposite sidewalk. As Garvey looked, Goree glanced at his face. If there be such a thing as a yellow wolf, here was its counterpart. Garvey snarled as his unhuman eyes followed the moving figure, disclosing long, amber-coloured fangs.

 

 “Is that him? Why, that’s the man who sent me to the penitentiary once!”

 

 “He used to be district attorney,” said Goree care- lessly. “And, by the way, he’s a first-class shot.”

 

 “I kin hit a squirrel’s eye at a hundred yard,” said Garvey. “So that thar’s Coltrane! I made a better trade than I was thinkin’. I’ll take keer ov this feud, Mr. Goree, better’n you ever did!”

 

 He moved toward the door, but lingered there, betray- ing a slight perplexity.

 

 “Anything else to-day?” inquired Goree with frothy sarcasm. “Any family traditions, ancestral ghosts, or skeletons in the closet? Prices as low as the lowest.”

 

 “Thar was another thing,” replied the unmoved squirrel hunter, “that Missis Garvey was thinkin’ of. ‘Tain’t so much in my line as t’other, but she wanted partic’lar that I should inquire, and ef you was willin’, ‘pay fur it,’ she says, ‘fa’r and squar’.’ Thar’s a buryin’ groun’, as you know, Mr. Goree, in the yard of yo’ old place, under the cedars. Them that lies thar is yo’ folks what was killed by the Coltranes. The monyments has the names on ’em. Missis Garvev says a fam’ly buryin’ groun’- is a sho’ sign of quality. She says ef we git the feud thar’s somethin’ else ought to go with it. The names on them moiivments is ‘Goree,’ but they can be changed to ourn by — ”

 

 “Go. Go!” screamed Goree, his face turning purple. He stretched out both hands toward the mountaineer, his fingers hooked and shaking. “Go, you ghoul! Even a Ch-Chinaman protects the g-graves of his ancestors — go!”

 

 The squirrel hunter slouched out of the door to his carryall. While he was climbing over the wheel Goree was collecting, with feverish celerity, the money that had fallen from his hand to the floor. As the vehicle slowly turned about, the sheep, with a coat of newly grown wool, was hurrying, in indecent haste, along the path to the court-house.

 

 At three o’clock in the morning they brought him back to his office, shorn and unconscious. The sheriff, the sportive deputy, the county clerk, and the gay attorney carried him, the chalk-faced man “from the valley” acting as escort.

 

 “On the table,” said one of them, and they deposited him there among the litter of his unprofitable books and papers.

 

 “Yance thinks a lot of a pair of deuces when he’s liquored up,” sighed the sheriff reflectively.

 

 “Too much,” said the gay attorney. “A man has no business to play poker who drinks as much as he does. I wonder how much he dropped to-night.”

 

 “Close to two hundred. What I wonder is whar he got it. Yance ain’t had a cent fur over a month, I know.”

 

 “Struck a client, maybe. Well, let’s get home before daylight. He’ll be all right when he wakes up, except for a sort of beehive about the cranium.”

 

 The gang slipped away through the early morning twilight. The next eye to gaze upon the miserable Goree was the orb of day. He peered through the uncurtained window, first deluging the sleeper in a flood of faint gold, but soon pouring upon the mottled red of his flesh a searching, white, summer heat. Goree stirred, half unconsciously, among the table’s dbris, and turned his face from the window. His movement dislodged a heavy law book, which crashed upon the floor. Opening his eyes, he saw, bending over him, a man in a black frock coat. Looking higher, he discovered a well-worn silk hat, and beneath it the kindly, smooth face of Colonel Abner Coltrane.

 

 A little uncertain of the outcome, the colonel waited for the other to make some sign of recognition. Not in twenty years had male members of these two families faced each other in peace. Goree’s eyelids puckered as he strained his blurred sight toward this visitor, and then he smiled serenely.

 

 “Have you brought Stella and Lucy over to play?” he said calmly.

 

 “Do you know me, Yancey?” asked Coltrane.

 

 “Of course I do. You brought me a whip with a whistle in the end.”

 

 So he had — twenty-four years ago; when Yancey’s father was his best friend.

 

 Goree’s eyes wandered about the room. The colonel understood. “Lie still, and I’ll bring you some,” said he. There was a pump in the yard at the rear, and Goree closed his eyes, listening with rapture to the click of its handle, and the bubbling of the falling stream. Col- trane brought a pitcher of the cool water, and held it for him to drink. Presently Goree sat up — a most forlorn object, his summer suit of flax soiled and crumpled, his discreditable head tousled and unsteady. He tried to wave one of his hands toward the colonel.

 

 “Ex-excuse-everything, will you?” he said. “I must have drunk too much whiskey last night, and gone to bed on the table.” His brows knitted into a puzzled frown.

 

 “Out with the boys awhile?” asked Coltrane kindly.

 

 “No, I went nowhere. I haven’t had a dollar to spend in the last two months. Struck the demijohn too often. I reckon, as usual.”

 

 Colonel Coltrane touched him on the shoulder.

 

 “A little while ago, Yancey,” he began, “you asked me if I had brought Stella and Lucy over to play. You weren’t quite awake then, and must have been dreaming you were a boy again. You are awake now, and I want you to listen to me. I have come from Stella and Lucy to their old playmate, and to my old friend’s son. They know that I am going to bring you home with me, and you will find them as ready with a welcome as they were in the old days. I want you to come to my house and stay until you are yourself aain, and as much longer as you will. We heard of your being down in the world, and in the midst of temptation, and we agreed that you should come over and play at our house once more. Will you come, my boy? Will you drop our old family trouble and come with me?”

 

 “Trouble!” said Goree, opening his eyes wide. “There was never any trouble between us that I know of. I’m sure we’ve always been the best friends. But, good Lord, Colonel, how could I go to your home as I am — a drunken wretch, a miserable, degraded spendthrift and gambler — ”

 

 He lurched from the table into his armchair, and began to weep maudlin tears, mingled with genuine drops of remorse and shame. Coltrane talked to him persist- ently and reasonably, reminding him of the simple moun- tain pleasures of which he had once been so fond, and insisting upon the genuineness of the invitation.

 

 Finally he landed Goree by telling him he was counting upon his help in the engineering and transportation of a large amount of felled timber from a high mountain-side to a waterway. He knew that Goree had once invented a device for this purpose — a series of slides and chutes- upon which he had justly prided himself. In an instant the poor fellow, delighted at the idea of his being of use to any one, had paper spread upon the table, and was drawing rapid but pitifully shaky lines in demonstration of what he could and would do.

 

 The man was sickened of the husks; his prodigal heart was turning again toward the mountains. His mind was yet strangely clogged, and his thoughts and memories were returning to his brain one by one, like carrier pigeons over a stormy sea. But Coltrane was satisfied with the progress he had made.

 

 Bethel received the surprise of its existence that after- noon when a Coltrane and a Goree rode amicably together through the town. Side by side they rode, out from the dusty streets and gaping townspeople, down across the creek bridge, and up toward the mountain. The prodigal had brushed and washed and combed himself to a more decent figure, but he was unsteady in the saddle, and he seemed to be deep in the contemplation of some vexing problem. Coltrane left him in his mood, relying upon the influence of changed surroundings to restore his equilibrium.

 

 Once Goree was seized with a shaking fit, and almost came to a collapse. He had to dismount and rest at the side of the road. The colonel, foreseeing such a con- dition, had provided a small flask of whisky for the journey but when it was offered to him Goree refused it almost with violence, declaring he would never touch it again. By and by he was recovered, and went quietly enough for a mile or two. Then he pulled up his horse suddenly, and said:

 

 “I lost two hundred dollars last night, playing poker. Now, where did I get that money?”

 

 “Take it easy, Yancev. The mountain air will soon clear it up. We’ll go fishing, first thing, at the Pinnacle Falls. The trout are jumping there like bullfrogs. We’ll take Stella and Lucy along, and have a picnic on Eagle Rock. Have you forgotten how a hickory-cured-ham sandwich tastes, Yancey, to a hungry fisherman?”

 

 Evidently the colonel did not believe the story of his lost wealth; so Goree retired again into brooding silence.

 

 By late Afternoon they had travelled ten of the twelve miles between Bethel and Laurel. Half a mile this side of Laurel lay the old Goree place; a mile or two beyond the village lived the Coltranes. The road was now steep and laborious, but the compensations were many. The tilted aisles of the forest were opulent with leaf and bird and bloom. The tonic air put to shame the pharma- copia. The glades were dark with mossy shade, and bright with shy rivulets winking from the ferns and laurels. On the lower side they viewed, framed in the near foilage, exquisite sketches of the far valley swooning in its opal haze.

 

 Coltrane was pleased to see that his companion was yielding to the spell of the hills and woods. For now they had but to skirt the base of Painter’s Cliff; to cross Elder Branch and mount the hill beyond, and Goree would have to face the squandered home of his fathers. Every rock he passed, every tree, every foot of the rocky way, was familiar to him. Though he hid forgotten the woods, they thrilled him like the music of “Home, Sweet Home.”

 

 They rounded the cliff, decended into Elder Branch, and paused there to let the horses drink and splash in the swift water. On the right was a rail fence that cornered there, and followed the road and stream. Inclosed by it was the old apple orchard of the home place; the house was yet concealed by the brow of the steep hill. Inside and along the fence, pokeberries, elders, sassafras, and sumac grew high and dense. At a rustle of their branches, both Goree and Coltrane glanced up, and saw a long, yellow, wolfish face above the fence, staring at them with pale, unwinking eyes. The head quicky disappeared; there was a violent swaying of the bushes, and an ungainly figure ran up through the apple orchard in the direction of the house, zigzagging among the trees.

 

 “That’s Garvey,” said Coltrane; “the man you sold out to. There’s no doubt but he’s considerably cracked. I had to send him up for moonshining, once, several years ago, in spite of the fact that I believed him irresponsible. Why, what’s the matter, Yancey?”

 

 Goree was wiping his forehead, and his face had lost its colour. “Do I look queer, too?” he asked, trying to smile. “I’m just remembering a few more things.” Some of the alcohol had evaporated from his brain. “I recollect now where I got that two hundred dollars.”

 

 “Don’t think of it,” said Coltrane cheerfully. “Later on we’ll figure it all out together.”

 

 They rode out of the branch, and when they reached the foot of the hill Goree stopped again.

 

 “Did you ever suspect I was a very vain kind of fellow, Colonel” he asked. “Sort of foolish proud about appearances?”

 

 The colonel’s eyes refused to wander to the soiled, sag- ging suit of flax and the faded slouch hat.

 

 “It seems to me,” he replied, mystified, but humouring him, “I remember a young buck about twenty, with the tightest coat, the sleekest hair, and the prancingest saddle horse in the Blue Ridge.”

 

 “Right you are,” said Goree eagerly. “And it’s in me yet, though it don’t show. Oh, I’m as vain as a turkey gobbler, and as proud as Lucifer. I’m going to ask you to indulge this weakness of mine in a little matter.”

 

 “Speak out, Yancey. We’ll create you Duke of Laurel and Baron of Blue Ridge, if you choose; and you shall have a feather out of Stella’s peacock’s tail to wear in your hat.”

 

 “I’m in earnest. In a few minutes we’ll pass the house up there on the hill where I was born, and where my people have lived for nearly a century. Strangers live there now — and look at me! I am about to show myself to them ragged and poverty-stricken, a wastrel and a beggar. Colonel Coltrane, I’m ashamed to do it. I want you to let me wear your coat and hat until we are out of sight beyond. I know you think it a foolish pride, but I want to make as good a showing as I can when I pass the old place.”

 

 “Now, what does this mean?” said Coltrane to him- self, as he compared his companion’s sane looks and quiet demeanour with his strange request. But he was already unbuttoning the coat, assenting readily, as if the fancy were io wise to be considered strange.

 

 The coat and hat fitted Goree well. He buttoned the former about him with a look of satisfaction and dignity. He and Coltrane were nearly the same size — rather tall, portly, and erect. Twenty-five years were between them, but in appearance they might have been brothers. Goree looked older than his age; his face was puffy and lined; the colonel had the smooth, fresh complexion of a temperate liver. He put on Goree’s disreputable old flax coat and faded slouch hat.

 

 “Now,” said Goree, taking up the reins, “I’m all right. I want you to ride about ten feet in the rear as we go by, Colonel, so that they can get a good look at me. They’ll see I’m no back number yet, by any means. I guess I’ll show up pretty well to them once more, any- how. Let’s ride on.”

 

 He set out up the hill at a smart trot, the colonel fol- lowing, as he had been requested.

 

 Goree sat straight in the saddle, with head erect, but his eyes were turned to the right, sharply scanning every shrub and fence and hiding-place in the old homestead yard. Once he muttered to himself, “Will the crazy fool try it, or did I dream half of it?”

 

 It was when he came opposite the little family burying ground that he saw what he had been looking for — a puff of white smoke, coming from the thick cedars in one comer. He toppled so slowly to the left that Coltrane had time to urge his horse to that side, and catch him with one arm.

 

 The squirrel hunter had not overpraised his aim. He had sent the bullet where he intended, and where Goree had expected that it would pass – through the breast of Colonel Abner Coltrane’s black frock coat.

 

 Goree leaned heavily against Coltrane, but he did not fall. The horses kept pace, side by side, and the Colonel’s arm kept him steady. The little white houses of Laurel shone through the trees, half a mile away. Goree reached out one hand and groped until it rested upon Coltrane’s fingers, which held his bridle.

 

 “Good friend,” he said, and that was all.

 

 Thus did Yancey Goree, as be rode past his old home, make, considering all things, the best showing that was in his power.!

The American writer known as O. Henry was born William Sydney Porter in 1862 in Greensboro, North Carolina. O. Henry’s short stories incorporate clever wordplay, wit, and endings with unexpected twists. A little known fact about O. Henry: in 1879, he started working in his uncle’s drugstore and by the age of nineteen, he was a licensed pharmacist. He used to sketch the townspeople and was known for his artistic talents.

As a young man, O. Henry moved to Texas in hopes of getting rid of his persistent cough. While there, he took up residence on a sheep ranch, learned shepherding, cooking, babysitting, and bits of Spanish and German from the many migrant farmhands. Over the next several years, Porter took a number of different jobs, from pharmacy to drafting, banking, and journalism. He loved reading classic literature and began writing as a hobby. He was a good musician and had an active social life in Austin, playing both the guitar and mandolin.

 Banking was not to be O. Henry’s calling, for apparently he was quite careless with his bookkeeping and may have embezzled funds. In 1894, he was accused by the bank of embezzlement and lost his job but was not indicted. In 1895, he moved to Houston and started writing for the The Post, earning $25 per month. O. Henry collected ideas for his column by loitering in hotel lobbies and observing and talking to people there. He used this technique throughout his writing career.

O. Henry’s prolific writing period began in 1902 in New York City, where he wrote 381 short stories. He wrote one story a week for The New York World Sunday Magazine for over a year. Some of his best and least known work is contained in Cabbages and Kings, his first collection of published stories, set in a central American town, in which sub- and larger-plots are interwoven in an engaging manner. His second collection of stories, The Four Million, is based on the idea that there are only really 400 people worth knowing in New York City. O. Henry had an obvious affection for New York City, where many of his stories are set.

Among his most famous stories: The Gift of the Magi about a young couple who are short of money but desperately want to buy each other Christmas gifts. The Ransom of Red Chief, is a story about exasperation where two kidnappers snatch the wrong boy. This story is a true classic read in classrooms around the world!  The Cop and the Anthem is about A New York City hobo with a creative solution for dealing with the cold city streets during winter. Another story, A Retrieved Reformation, is about a safecracker Jimmy Valentine, fresh from prison, whose life takes an unexpected turn while casing his next crime scene. O. Henry’s trademark is his witty, plot-twisting endings, and his warm characterization of the awkward and difficult situations and the creative ways people find to resolve them.

In 1952, a film featuring five stories, called O. Henry’s Full House, featuring Marilyn Monroe and Charles Laughton in O. Henry’s story by the same name, The Cop and the Anthem. The film featured four other O. Henry stories: The Clarion Call, The Last Leaf, The Ransom of Red Chief (starring Fred Allen and Oscar Levant), and The Gift of the Magi. O. Henry left a rich legacy of great short stories for us to enjoy.

 Unfortunately, O. Henry’s personal tragedy was heavy drinking and by 1908 his health had deteriorated and his writing dropped off. He died in 1910 of cirrhosis of the liver, complications of diabetes and an enlarged heart. The funeral was held in New York City, but he was buried in North Carolina, the state where he was born.
O. Henry moved to New York City in 1902 and from December 1903 to January 1906 he wrote a story a week for the New York World, also publishing in other magazines. Henry’s first collection, Cabbages And Kings appeared in 1904. The second, The Four Million, was published two years later and included his well-known stories “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Furnished Room”. The Trimmed Lamp (1907) included “The Last Leaf”. Henry’s best known work is perhaps the much anthologized “The Ransom of Red Chief”, included in the collection  Whirligigs (1910).  The Heart Of The West (1907) presented tales of the Texas range. O. Henry published 10 collections and over 600 short stories during his lifetime.

O. Henry’s last years were shadowed by alcoholism, ill health, and financial problems. He married Sara Lindsay Coleman in 1907, but the marriage was not happy, and they separated a year later. O. Henry died of cirrhosis of the liver on June 5, 1910, in New York. Three more collections, Sixes And Sevens (1911), Rolling Stones (1912) and Waifs And Strays (1917), appeared posthumously.

O. Henry

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’hфte of an Eighth Street “Delmonico’s,” and found their tastes in art, chicory salad and bishop sleeves so congenial that the joint studio resulted.

 

     That was in May. In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony, touching one here and there with his icy fingers. 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 California 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-u on the side of the undertaker makes the entire pharmacopoeia look silly. Your little lady has made up her mind that she’s not going to get well. Has she anything on her mind?”

<  2  >

 

      “She – she wanted to paint the Bay of Naples some day.” said Sue.

 

     “Paint? – bosh! Has she anything on her mind worth thinking twice – a man for instance?”

 

     “A man?” said Sue, with a jew’s-harp twang in her voice. “Is a man worth – but, no, doctor; there is nothing of the kind.”

 

     “Well, it is the weakness, then,” said the doctor. “I will do all that science, so far as it may filter through my efforts, can accomplish. But whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines. If you will get her to ask one question about the new winter styles in cloak sleeves I will promise you a one-in-five chance for her, instead of one in ten.”

 

     After the doctor had gone Sue went into the workroom and cried a Japanese napkin to a pulp. Then she swaggered into Johnsy’s room with her drawing board, whistling ragtime.

 

     Johnsy lay, scarcely making a ripple under the bedclothes, with her face toward the window. Sue stopped whistling, thinking she was asleep.

 

     She arranged her board and began a pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate a magazine story. Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature.

 

     As Sue was sketching a pair of elegant horseshow riding trousers and a monocle of 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 little later “eleven”; and then “ten,” and “nine”; and then “eight” and “seven”, almost together.

 

     Sue look solicitously out of 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.

<  3  >

 

      “What is it, dear?” asked Sue.

 

     “Six,” said Johnsy, in almost a whisper. “They’re falling faster now. Three days ago there were almost a hundred. It made my head ache to count them. But now it’s easy. There goes another one. There are only five left now.”

 

     “Five what, dear? Tell your Sudie.”

 

     “Leaves. On the ivy vine. When the last one falls I must go, too. I’ve known that for three days. Didn’t the doctor tell you?”

 

     “Oh, I never heard of such nonsense,” complained Sue, with magnificent scorn. “What have old ivy leaves to do with your getting well? And you used to love that vine so, you naughty girl. Don’t be a goosey. Why, the doctor told me this morning that your chances for getting well real soon were – let’s see exactly what he said – he said the chances were ten to one! Why, that’s almost as good a chance as we have in New York when we ride on the street cars or walk past a new building. Try to take some broth now, and let Sudie go back to her drawing, so she can sell the editor man with it, and buy port wine for her sick child, and pork chops for her greedy self.”

 

     “You needn’t get any more wine,” said Johnsy, keeping her eyes fixed out the window. “There goes another. No, I don’t want any broth. That leaves just four. I want to see the last one fall before it gets dark. Then I’ll go, too.”

 

     “Johnsy, dear,” said Sue, bending over her, “will you promise me to keep your eyes closed, and not look out 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. “Beside, I don’t want you to keep looking at those silly ivy leaves.”

<  4  >

 

      “Tell me as soon as you have finished,” said Johnsy, closing her eyes, and lying white and still as 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 ’til 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 with the body of an imp. Behrman was a failure in art. Forty years he had wielded the brush without getting near enough to touch the hem of his Mistress’s robe. He had been always about to paint a masterpiece, but had never yet begun it. For several years he had painted nothing except now and then a daub in the line of commerce or advertising. He earned a little by serving as a model to those young artists in the colony who could not pay the price of a professional. He drank gin to excess, and still talked of his coming masterpiece. For the rest he was a fierce little old man, who scoffed terribly at softness in any one, 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.

<  5  >

 

      “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 will not bose as a model for your fool hermit-dunderhead. Vy do you allow dot silly pusiness to come in der brain of her? Ach, dot poor leetle Miss Yohnsy.”

 

     “She is very ill and 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 flibbertigibbet.”

 

     “You are just like a woman!” yelled Behrman. “Who said I will 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 away. 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 one on the vine. Still dark greeear its stem, with its serrated edges tinted with the yellow of dissolution and decay, it hung bravely from the branch some twenty feet above the ground.

<  6  >

 

      “It is the last one,” said Johnsy. “I thought it would surely fall during the night. I heard the wind. It will fall to-day, and I shall die at the same time.”

 

     “Dear, dear!” said Sue, leaning her worn face down to the pillow, “think of me, if you won’t think of yourself. What would I do?”

 

     But Johnsy did not answer. The lonesomest thing in all the world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey. The fancy seemed to possess her more strongly as one by one the ties that bound her to friendship and to earth were loosed.

 

     The day wore away, and even through the twilight they could see the lone ivy leaf clinging to its stem against the wall. And then, with the coming of the night the north wind was again loosed, while the rain still beat against the windows and pattered down from the low Dutch eaves.

 

     When it was light enough Johnsy, the merciless, commanded that the shade be raised.

 

     The ivy leaf was still there.

 

     Johnsy lay for a long time looking at it. And then she called to Sue, who was stirring her chicken broth over the gas stove.

 

     “I’ve been a bad girl, Sudie,” said Johnsy. “Something has made that last leaf stay there to show me how wicked I was. It is a sin to want to die. You may bring a 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.”

 

     And 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.

<  7  >

 

      “Even chances,” said the doctor, taking 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 won. Nutrition and care now – that’s all.”

 

     And that afternoon Sue came to the bed where Johnsy lay, contentedly knitting a very blue and very useless woollen shoulder scarf, and put one arm around her, pillows and all.

 

     “I have something to tell you, white mouse,” she said. “Mr. Behrman died of pneumonia to-day in the hospital. He was ill only two days. The janitor found him 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.”

The Romance of a Busy Broker

 by O. Henry

Pitcher, confidential clerk in the office of Harvey Maxwell, broker, allowed a look of mild interest and surprise to visit his usually expressionless countenance when his employer briskly entered at half past nine in company with his young lady stenographer. With a snappy “Good-morning, Pitcher,” Maxwell dashed at his desk as though he were intending to leap over it, and then plunged into the great heap of letters and telegrams waiting there for him.

 

 The young lady had been Maxwell’s stenographer for a year. She was beautiful in a way that was decidedly unstenographic. She forewent the pomp of the alluring pompadour. She wore no chains, bracelets or lockets. She had not the air of being about to accept an invitation to luncheon. Her dress was grey and plain, but it fitted her figure with fidelity and discretion. In her neat black turban hat was the gold-green wing of a macaw. On this morning she was softly and shyly radiant. Her eyes were dreamily bright, her cheeks genuine peachblow, her expression a happy one, tinged with reminiscence.

 

 Pitcher, still mildly curious, noticed a difference in her ways this morning. Instead of going straight into the adjoining room, where her desk was, she lingered, slightly irresolute, in the outer office. Once she moved over by Maxwell’s desk, near enough for him to be aware of her presence.

 

 The machine sitting at that desk was no longer a man; it was a busy New York broker, moved by buzzing wheels and uncoiling springs.

 

 “Well–what is it? Anything?” asked Maxwell sharply. His opened mail lay like a bank of stage snow on his crowded desk. His keen grey eye, impersonal and brusque, flashed upon her half impatiently.

 

 “Nothing,” answered the stenographer, moving away with a little smile.

 

 “Mr. Pitcher,” she said to the confidential clerk, did Mr. Maxwell say anything yesterday about engaging another stenographer?”

 

 “He did,” answered Pitcher. “He told me to get another one. I notified the agency yesterday afternoon to send over a few samples this morning. It’s 9.45 o’clock, and not a single picture hat or piece of pineapple chewing gum has showed up yet.”

 

 “I will do the work as usual, then,” said the young lady, “until some one comes to fill the place.” And she went to her desk at once and hung the black turban hat with the gold-green macaw wing in its accustomed place.

 

 He who has been denied the spectacle of a busy Manhattan broker during a rush of business is handicapped for the profession of anthropology. The poet sings of the “crowded hour of glorious life.” The broker’s hour is not only crowded, but the minutes and seconds are hanging to all the straps and packing both front and rear platforms.

 

 And this day was Harvey Maxwell’s busy day. The ticker began to reel out jerkily its fitful coils of tape, the desk telephone had a chronic attack of buzzing. Men began to throng into the office and call at him over the railing, jovially, sharply, viciously, excitedly. Messenger boys ran in and out with messages and telegrams. The clerks in the office jumped about like sailors during a storm. Even Pitcher’s face relaxed into something resembling animation.

 

 On the Exchange there were hurricanes and landslides and snowstorms and glaciers and volcanoes, and those elemental disturbances were reproduced in miniature in the broker’s offices. Maxwell shoved his chair against the wall and transacted business after the manner of a toe dancer. He jumped from ticker to ‘phone, from desk to door with the trained agility of a harlequin.

 

 In the midst of this growing and important stress the broker became suddenly aware of a high-rolled fringe of golden hair under a nodding canopy of velvet and ostrich tips, an imitation sealskin sacque and a string of beads as large as hickory nuts, ending near the floor with a silver heart. There was a self-possessed young lady connected with these accessories; and Pitcher was there to construe her.

 

 “Lady from the Stenographer’s Agency to see about the position,” said Pitcher.

 

 Maxwell turned half around, with his hands full of papers and ticker tape.

 

 “What position?” he asked, with a frown.

 

 “Position of stenographer,” said Pitcher. “You told me yesterday to call them up and have one sent over this morning.”

 

 “You are losing your mind, Pitcher,” said Maxwell. “Why should I have given you any such instructions? Miss Leslie has given perfect satisfaction during the year she has been here. The place is hers as long as she chooses to retain it. There’s no place open here, madam. Countermand that order with the agency, Pitcher, and don’t bring any more of ’em in here.”

 

 The silver heart left the office, swinging and banging itself independently against the office furniture as it indignantly departed. Pitcher seized a moment to remark to the bookkeeper that the “old man” seemed to get more absent-minded and forgetful every day of the world.

 

 The rush and pace of business grew fiercer and faster. On the floor they were pounding half a dozen stocks in which Maxwell’s customers were heavy investors. Orders to buy and sell were coming and going as swift as the flight of swallows. Some of his own holdings were imperilled, and the man was working like some high-geared, delicate, strong machine–strung to full tension, going at full speed, accurate, never hesitating, with the proper word and decision and act ready and prompt as clockwork. Stocks and bonds, loans and mortgages, margins and securities–here was a world of finance, and there was no room in it for the human world or the world of nature.

 

 When the luncheon hour drew near there came a slight lull in the uproar.

 

 Maxwell stood by his desk with his hands full of telegrams and memoranda, with a fountain pen over his right ear and his hair hanging in disorderly strings over his forehead. His window was open, for the beloved janitress Spring had turned on a little warmth through the waking registers of the earth.

 

 And through the window came a wandering–perhaps a lost–odour–a delicate, sweet odour of lilac that fixed the broker for a 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 he my wife? I haven’t had time to make love to you in the ordinary way, but I really do love you. Talk quick, please–those fellows are clubbing the stuffing out of Union Pacific.”

 

 “Oh, what are you talking about?” exclaimed the young lady. She rose to her feet and gazed upon him, round-eyed.

 

 “Don’t you understand?” said Maxwell, restively. “I want you to marry me. I love you, Miss Leslie. I wanted to tell you, and I snatched a minute when things had slackened up a bit. They’re calling me for the ‘phone now. Tell ’em to wait a minute, Pitcher. Won’t you, Miss Leslie?”

 

 The stenographer acted very queerly. At first she seemed overcome with amazement; then tears flowed from her wondering eyes; and then she smiled sunnily through them, and one of her arms slid tenderly about the broker’s neck.

 

 “I know now,” she said, softly. “It’s this old business that has driven everything else out of your head for the time. I was frightened at first. Don’t you remember, Harvey? We were married last evening at 8 o’clock in the Little Church Around the Corner.”

 

 

A Harlem Tragedy

by O. Henry.

 

Harlem.

 

 Mrs. Fink had dropped into Mrs. Cassidy’s flat one flight below.

 

 “Ain’t it a beaut?” said Mrs. Cassidy.

 

 She turned her face proudly for her friend Mrs. Fink to see. One eye was nearly closed, with a great, greenish-purple bruise around it. Her lip was cut and bleeding a little and there were red finger-marks on each side of her neck.

 

 “My husband wouldn’t ever think of doing that to me,” said Mrs. Fink, concealing her envy.

 

 “I wouldn’t have a man,” declared Mrs. Cassidy, “that didn’t beat me up at least once a week. Shows he thinks something of you. Say! but that last dose Jack gave me wasn’t no homeopathic one. I can see stars yet. But he’ll be the sweetest man in town for the rest of the week to make up for it. This eye is good for theater tickets and a silk shirt waist at the very least.”

 

 “I should hope,” said Mrs. Fink, assuming complacency, “that Mr. Fink is too much of a gentleman ever to raise his hand against me.”

 

 “Oh, go on, Maggie!” said Mrs. Cassidy, laughing and applying witch hazel, “you’re only jealous. Your old man is too frapped and slow to ever give you a punch. He just sits down and practises physical culture with a newspaper when he comes home–now ain’t that the truth?”

 

 “Mr. Fink certainly peruses of the papers when he comes home,” acknowledged Mrs. Fink, with a toss of her head; “but he certainly don’t ever make no Steve O’Donnell out of me just to amuse himself–that’s a sure thing.”

 

 Mrs. Cassidy laughed the contented laugh of the guarded and happy matron. With the air of Cornelia exhibiting her jewels, she drew down the collar of her kimono and revealed another treasured bruise, maroon-colored, edged with olive and orange–a bruise now nearly well, but still to memory dear.

 

 Mrs. Fink capitulated. The formal light in her eye softened to envious admiration. She and Mrs. Cassidy had been chums in the downtown paper-box factory before they had married, one year before. Now she and her man occupied the flat above Mame and her man. Therefore she could not put on airs with Mame.

 

 “Don’t it hurt when he soaks you?” asked Mrs. Fink, curiously.

 

 “Hurt!”–Mrs. Cassidy gave a soprano scream of delight. “Well, say–did you ever have a brick house fall on you?–well, that’s just the way it feels–just like when they’re digging you out of the ruins. Jack’s got a left that spells two matinees and a new pair of Oxfords–and his right!–well, it takes a trip to Coney and six pairs of openwork, silk lisle threads to make that good.”

 

 “But what does he beat you for?” inquired Mrs. Fink, with wide-open eyes.

 

 “Silly!” said Mrs. Cassidy, indulgently. “Why, because he’s full. It’s generally on Saturday nights.”

 

 “But what cause do you give him?” persisted the seeker after knowledge.

 

 “Why, didn’t I marry him? Jack comes in tanked up; and I’m here, ain’t I? Who else has he got a right to beat? I’d just like to catch him once beating anybody else! Sometimes it’s because supper ain’t ready; and sometimes it’s because it is. Jack ain’t particular about causes. He just lushes till he remembers he’s married, and then he makes for home and does me up. Saturday nights I just move the furniture with sharp corners out of the way, so I won’t cut my head when he gets his work in. He’s got a left swing that jars you! Sometimes I take the count in the first round; but when I feel like having a good time during the week or want some new rags I come up again for more punishment. That’s what I done last night. Jack knows I’ve been wanting a black silk waist for a month, and I didn’t think just one black eye would bring it. Tell you what, Mag, I’ll bet you the ice cream he brings it to-night.”

 

 Mrs. Fink was thinking deeply.

 

 “My Mart,” she said, “never hit me a lick in his life. It’s just like you said, Mame; he comes in grouchy and ain’t got a word to say. He never takes me out anywhere. He’s a chair-warmer at home for fair. He buys me things, but he looks so glum about it that I never appreciate ’em.”

 

 Mrs. Cassidy slipped an arm around her chum. “You poor thing!” she said. “But everybody can’t have a husband like Jack. Marriage wouldn’t be no failure if they was all like him. These discontented wives you hear about–what they need is a man to come home and kick their slats in once a week, and then make it up in kisses, and chocolate creams. That’d give ’em some interest in life. What I want is a masterful man that slugs you when he’s jagged and hugs you when he ain’t jagged. Preserve me from the man that ain’t got the sand to do neither!”

 

 Mrs. Fink sighed.

 

 The hallways were suddenly filled with sound. The door flew open at the kick of Mr. Cassidy. His arms were occupied with bundles. Mame flew and hung about his neck. Her sound eye sparkled with the love light that shines in the eye of the Maori maid when she recovers consciousness in the hut of the wooer who has stunned and dragged her there.

 

 “Hello, old girl!” shouted Mr. Cassidy. He shed his bundles and lifted her off her feet in a mighty hug. “I got tickets for Barnum & Bailey’s, and if you’ll bust the string of one of them bundles I guess you’ll find that silk waist–why, good evening, Mrs. Fink–I didn’t see you at first. How’s old Mart coming along?”

 

 “He’s very well, Mr. Cassidy–thanks,” said Mrs. Fink. “I must be going along up now. Mart’ll be home for supper soon. I’ll bring you down that pattern you wanted to-morrow, Mame.”

 

 Mrs. Fink went up to her flat and had a little cry. It was a meaningless cry, the kind of cry that only a woman knows about, a cry from no particular cause, altogether an absurd cry; the most transient and the most hopeless cry in the repertory of grief. Why had Martiever thrashed her? He was as big and strong as Jack Cassidy. Did he not care for her at all? He never quarrelled; he came home and lounged about, silent, glum, idle. He was a fairly good provider, but he ignored the spices of life.

 

 Mrs. Fink’s ship of dreams was becalmed. Her captain ranged between plum duff and his hammock. If only he would shiver his timbers or stamp his foot on the quarter-deck now and then! And she had thought to sail so merrily, touching at ports in the Delectable Isles! But now, to vary the figure, she was ready to throw up the sponge, tired out, without a scratch to show for all those tame rounds with her sparring partner. For one moment she almost hated Mame–Mame, with her cuts and bruises, her salve of presents and kisses; her stormy voyage with her fighting, brutal, loving mate.

 

 Mr. Fink came home at 7. He was permeated with the curse of domesticity. Beyond the portals of his cozy home he cared not to roam, to roam. He was the man who had caught the street car, the anaconda that had swallowed its prey, the tree that lay as it had fallen.

 

 “Like the supper, Mart?” asked Mrs. Fink, who had striven over it.

 

 “M-m-m-yep,” grunted Mr. Fink.

 

 After supper he gathered his newspapers to read. He sat in his stocking feet.

 

 Arise, some new Dante, and sing me the befitting corner of perdition for the man who sitteth in the house in his stockinged feet. Sisters of Patience who by reason of ties or duty have endured it in silk, yarn, cotton, lisle thread or woollen–does not the new canto belong?

 

 The next day was Labor Day. The occupations of Mr. Cassidy and Mr. Fink ceased for one passage of the sun. Labor, triumphant, would parade and otherwise disport itself.

 

 Mrs. Fink took Mrs. Cassidy’s pattern down early. Mame had on her new silk waist. Even her damaged eye managed to emit a holiday gleam. Jack was fruitfully penitent, and there was a hilarious scheme for the day afoot, with parks and picnics and Pilsener in it.

 

 A rising, indignant jealousy seized Mrs. Fink as she returned to her flat above. Oh, happy Mame, with her bruises and her quick-following balm! But was Mame to have a monopoly of happiness? Surely Martin Fink was as good a man as Jack Cassidy. Was his wife to go always unbelabored and uncaressed? A sudden, brilliant, breathless idea came to Mrs. Fink. She would show Mame that there were husbands as able to use their fists and perhaps to be as tender afterward as any Jack.

 

 The holiday promised to be a nominal one with the Finks. Mrs. Fink had the stationary washtubs in the kitchen filled with a two weeks’ wash that had been soaking overnight. Mr. Fink sat in his stockinged feet reading a newspaper. Thus Labor Day presaged to speed.

 

 Jealousy surged high in Mrs. Fink’s heart, and higher still surged an audacious resolve. If her man would not strike her–if he would not so far prove his manhood, his prerogative and his interest in conjugal affairs, he must be prompted to his duty.

 

 Mr. Fink lit his pipe and peacefully rubbed an ankle with a stockinged toe. He reposed in the state of matrimony like a lump of unblended suet in a pudding. This was his level Elysium–to sit at ease vicariously girdling the world in print amid the wifely splashing of suds and the agreeable smells of breakfast dishes departed and dinner ones to come. Many ideas were far from his mind; but the furthest one was the thought of beating his wife.

 

 Mrs. Fink turned on the hot water and set the washboards in the suds. Up from the flat below came the gay laugh of Mrs. Cassidy. It sounded like a taunt, a flaunting of her own happiness in the face of the unslugged bride above. Now was Mrs. Fink’s time.

 

 Suddenly she turned like a fury upon the man reading.

 

 “You lazy loafer!” she cried, “must I work my arms off washing and toiling for the ugly likes of you? Are you a man or are you a kitchen hound?”

 

 Mr. Fink dropped his paper, motionless from surprise. She feared that he would not strike–that the provocation had been insufficient. She leaped at him and struck him fiercely in the face with her clenched hand. In that instant she felt a thrill of love for him such as she had not felt for many a day. Rise up, Martin Fink, and come into your kingdom! Oh, she must feel the weight of his hand now–just to show that he cared–just to show that he cared!

 

 Mr. Fink sprang to his feet–Maggie caught him again on the jaw with a wide swing of her other hand. She closed her eyes in that fearful, blissful moment before his blow should come–she whispered his name to herself–she leaned to the expected shock, hungry for it.

 

 In the flat below Mr. Cassidy, with a shamed and contrite face was powdering Mame’s eye in preparation for their junket. From the flat above came the sound of a woman’s voice, high-raised, a bumping, a stumbling and a shuffling, a chair overturned–unmistakable sounds of domestic conflict.

 

 “Mart and Mag scrapping?” postulated Mr. Cassidy. “Didn’t know they ever indulged. Shall I trot up and see if they need a sponge holder?”

 

 One of Mrs. Cassidy’s eyes sparkled like a diamond. The other twinkled at least like paste.

 

 “Oh, oh,” she said, softly and without apparent meaning, in the feminine ejaculatory manner. “I wonder if–wonder if! Wait, Jack, till I go up and see.”

 

 Up the stairs she sped. As her foot struck the hallway above out from the kitchen door of her flat wildly flounced Mrs. Fink.

 

 “Oh, Maggie,” cried Mrs. Cassidy, in a delighted whisper; “did he? Oh, did he?”

 

 Mrs. Fink ran and laid her face upon her chum’s shoulder and sobbed hopelessly.

 

 Mrs. Cassidy took Maggie’s face between her hands and lifted it gently. Tear-stained it was, flushing and paling, but its velvety, pink-and-white, becomingly freckled surface was unscratched, unbruised, unmarred by the recreant fist of Mr. Fink.

 

 “Tell me, Maggie,” pleaded Mame, “or I’ll go in there and find out. What was it? Did he hurt you–what did he do?”

 

 Mrs. Fink’s face went down again despairingly on the bosom of her friend.

 

 “For God’s sake don’t open that door, Mame,” she sobbed. “And don’t ever tell nobody–keep it under your hat. He–he never touched me, and–he’s–oh, Gawd–he’s washin’ the clothes–he’s washin’ the clothes!”

References:

1.      The Northon Anthology of American Literature. Shorter sixth edition.

2.     Nina Baym, General editor. – 2003.- W.W. Norton @ Company, Inc. NY. – 2930 p.

3.     Additional: An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser.

4.     From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore Dreiser  

 

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