O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 291

of Locust Valley Farm, Ulster County, and then began to take descriptions of the strong-arm
gentlemen.

When Conant went to see the editor about the fate of his poem, he was received over the head of
the office boy into the inner office that is decorated with the statuettes by Rodin and J. G. Brown.

'When I read the first line of "The Doe and the Brook," ' said the editor, 'I knew it to be the work
of one whose life has been heart to heart with nature. The finished art of the line did not blind me
to that fact. To use a somewhat homely comparison, it was as if a wild, free child of the woods
and fields were to don the garb of fashion and walk down Broadway. Beneath the apparel the man
would show.

' 'Thanks,' said Conant. 'I suppose the cheque will be round on Thursday, as usual.' The morals of
this story have somehow gotten mixed. You can take your choice of 'Stay on the Farm' or 'Don't
write Poetry.'

XL.VIII

The Thing's the Play

BEING ACQUAINTED WITH a newspaper reporter who had a couple of free passes, I got to see
the performance a few nights ago at one of the popular vaudeville houses. One of the numbers
was a violin solo by a striking-looking man not much past forty, but with very grey, thick hair.
Not being afflicted with a taste for music, I let the system of noises drift past my ears while I
regarded the man. 'There was a story about that chap a month or two ago,' said the reporter. 'They
gave me the assignment. It was to run a column and was to be on the extremely light and joking
order. The old man seems to like the funny touch I give to local happenings. Oh yes, I'm working
on a farce comedy now. Well, I went down to the house and got all the details; but I certainly fell
down on that job. I went back and turned in a comic write-up of an east side funeral instead.
Why? Oh, I couldn't seem to get hold of it with my funny hooks, somehow. Maybe you could
make a one-act tragedy out of it for a curtain-raiser. I'll give you the details.' After the
performance my friend, the reporter, recited to me the facts over the Würzburger.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES
297

racking, petitionary music of a violin. The hag, music, bewitches some of the noblest. The daws
may peck upon one's sleeve without in injury, but whoever wears his heart upon his tympanum
gets it not far from the neck.

This music and the musician called her, and at her side honour and the old love held her back.

'Forgive me,' he pleaded.

'Twenty years is a long time to remain away from the one you say you love,' she declared, with a
purgatorial touch.

'How could I tell?' he begged. 'I will conceal nothing from you. That night when he left I
followed him. I was mad with jealousy. On a dark street I struck him down. He did not rise. I
examined him. His head had struck a stone. I did not intend to kill him. I was mad with love and
jealousy. I hid near by and saw an ambulance take him away. Although you married him, Helen - '

'Who are you?' cried the woman, with wide-open eyes, snatching her hand away.

'Don't you remember me, Helen - the one who has always loved you the best? I am John Delaney.
If you can forgive - ' But she was gone, leaping, stumbling, hurrying, flying up the stairs toward
the music and him who had forgotten, but who had known her for his in each of his two
existences, and as she climbed up she sobbed, cried and sang: 'Frank! Frank! Frank!'

Three mortals thus juggling with years as though they were billiard balls, and my friend, the
reporter, couldn't see anything funny in it!

XL1X

A Ramble in Aphasia

M Y WIFE AND I PARTED on that morning in precisely our usual manner. She left her second
cup of tea to follow me to the front door. There she plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of
lint (the universal act of woman to proclaim ownership) and bade me take care of my cold. I had
no cold. Next came her kiss of parting - the level kiss of domesticity flavoured with Young
Hyson. There was no fear of the extemporaneous, of variety spicing her infinite custom. With the
deft touch of long malpractice, she dabbed awry my well-set scarf-pin; and then, as I closed the
door, I heard her morning slippers pattering back to her cooling tea.
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When I set out I had no thought or premonition of what was to occur. The attack came suddenly.

For many weeks I had been toiling, almost night and day, at a famous railroad law case that I
won triumphantly but a few days previously. In fact, I had been digging away at the law almost
without cessation for many years. Once or twice good Doctor Volney, my friend and physician,
had warned me.

'If you don't slacken up, Bellford,' he said, 'you'll go suddenly to pieces. Either your nerves or
your brain will give way. Tell me, does a week pass in which you do not read in the papers of a
case of aphasia - of some man lost, wandering nameless, with his past and his identity blotted out
- and all from that little brain-clot made by overwork or worry?'

'I always thought,' said I, 'that the clot in those instances was really to be found on the brains of
the newspaper reporters.' Dr. Volney shook his head.

'The disease exists,' he said. 'You need a change or a rest. Court-room, office and home - there is
the only route you travel. For recreation you - read law books. Better take warning in time.' 'On
Thursday nights,' I said defensively, 'my wife and I play cribbage. On Sundays she reads to me
the weekly letter from her mother. That law books are not a recreation remains yet to be
established.

' That morning as I walked I was thinking of Doctor Volney's words. I was feeling as well as I
usually did - possibly in better spirits than usual.

I awoke with stiff and cramped muscles from having slept long on the incommodious seat of a
day coach. I leaned my head against the seat and tried to think. After a long time I said to myself:
'I must have a name of some sort.' I searched my pockets. Not a card; not a letter; not a paper or
monogram could I find. But I found in my coat pocket nearly $3,000 in bills of large
denomination. 'I must be someone, of course,' I repeated to myself, and began again to consider.

The car was well crowded with men, among whom I told myself, there must have been some
common interest, for they intermingled freely, and seemed in the best good-humour and spirits.
One of them - a stout, spectacled gentleman enveloped in a decided odour of cinnamon and aloes
- took the vacant half of my seat with a friendly nod, and unfolded a newspaper. In the intervals
between his periods of reading, we conversed, as travellers will, on current
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES
299

affairs. I found myself able to sustain the conversation on such subjects with credit, at least to my
memory. By and by my companion said:

'You are one of us, of course. Fine lot of men the West sends in this time. I'm glad they held the
convention in New York; I've never been East before. My name's R. P. Bolder - Bolder & Son, of
Hickory Grove, Missouri.'

Though unprepared, I rose to the emergency, as men will when put to it. Now must I hold a
christening, and be at once babe, parson and parent. My senses came to the rescue of my slower
brain. The insistent odour of drugs from my companion supplied one idea; a glance at his
newspaper, where my eye met a conspicuous advertisement, assisted me further.

'My name,' said I glibly, 'is Edward Pinkhammer. I am a druggist, and my home is in Cornopolis,
Kansas.' 'I knew you were a druggist,' said my fellow-traveller affably. 'I saw the callous spot on
your right forefinger where the handle of the pestle rubs. Of course, you are a delegate to our
National Convention.’

'Are all these men druggists?' I asked wonderingly.

'They are. This car came through from the West. And they're your old-time druggists, too - none
of your patent tablet-and-granule pharmashootists that use slot machines instead of a prescription
desk. We percolate our own paregoric and roll our own pills, and we ain't above handling a few
garden seeds in the spring, and carrying a sideline of confectionery and shoes. I tell you,
Hampinker, I've got an idea to spring on this convention - new ideas is what they want. Now, you
know the shelf bottles of tartar emetic and Rochelle salt Ant. et Pot. Tart. and Sod. et Pot. Tart. -
one's poison, you know, and the other's harmless. It's easy to mistake one label for the other.
Where do druggists mostly keep 'em? Why, as far apart as possible, on different shelves. That's
wrong. I say keep 'em side by side so when you want one you can always compare it with the
other and avoid mistakes. Do you catch the idea?'

'It seems to me a very good one,' I said. 'All right! When I spring it on the convention you back it
up. We'll make some of these Eastern orange-phosphate-and-massage-cream professors that think
they're the only lozenges in the market look like hypodermic tablets.'

'If I can be of any aid,' I said, warming, 'the two bottles of - er - ' 'Tartrate of antimony and potash,
and tartrate of soda and potash.
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'Shall henceforth sit side by side,' I concluded firmly.

'Now, there's another thing,' said Mr. Bolder. 'For an excipient in manipulating a pill mass which
do you prefer - the magnesia carbonate or the pulverized glycerrhiza radix?'

'The - er - magnesia,' I said. It was easier to say than the other word.

Mr. Bolder glanced at me distrustfully through his spectacles.

'Give me the glycerrhiza,' said he. 'Magnesia cakes.' 'Here's another one of these fake aphasia
cases,' he said, presently, handing me his newspaper, and laying his finger upon an article. 'I don't
believe in 'em. I put nine out of ten of 'em down as frauds. A man gets sick of his business and his
folks and wants to have a good time. He skips out somewhere, and when they find him he
pretends to have lost his memory - don't know his own name, and won't even recognize the
strawberry mark on his wife's left shoulder. Aphasia! Tut! Why can't they stay at home and
forget?'

I took the paper and read, after the pungent headlines, the following:

'DENVER, June 12. - Elwyn C. Bellford, a prominent lawyer, is mysteriously missing from his
home since three days ago, and all efforts to locate him have been in vain. Mr. Bellford is a well-
known citizen of the highest standing, and has enjoyed a large and lucrative law practice. He is
married and owns a fine home and the most extensive private library in the State. On the day of
his disappearance, he drew quite a large sum of money from his bank. No one can be found who
saw him after he left the bank. Mr. Bellford was a man of singularly quiet and domestic tastes,
and seemed to find his happiness in his home and profession. If any clue at all exists to his strange
disappearance, it may be found in the fact that for some months he had been deeply absorbed in
an important law case in connection with the Q. Y. and Z. Railroad Company. It is feared that
overwork may have affected his mind. Every effort is being made to discover the whereabouts of
the missing man.

' 'It seems to me you are not altogether uncynical Mr. Bolder,' I said, after I had read the despatch.
'This has the sound, to me, of a genuine case. Why should this man, prosperous, happily married
and respected, choose suddenly to abandon everything? I know that these lapses of memory do
occur, and that men do find themselves adrift without a name, a history or a home.' 'Oh, gammon
and jalap!' said Mr. Bolder. 'It's larks they're after. There's too much education nowadays. Men
know about aphasia, and they use it for an excuse. The women are wise, too.
301 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

When it's all over they look you in the eye, as scientific as you please, and say: "He hypnotized
me." ' Thus Mr. Bolder diverted, but did not aid me with his comments and philosophy.

We arrived in New York about ten at night. I rode in a cab to an hotel, and I wrote my name
'Edward Pinkhammer' in the register. As I did so I felt pervade me a splendid, wild, intoxicating
buoyancy - a sense of unlimited freedom, of newly attained possibilities. I was just born into the
world. The old fetters - whatever they had been - were stricken from my hands and feet. The
future lay before me a clear road such as an infant enters, and I could set out upon it equipped
with a man's learning and experience. I thought the hotel clerk looked at me five seconds too long.
I had no baggage.

'The Druggists' Convention,' I said. 'My trunk has somehow failed to arrive.' I drew out a roll of
money. 'Ah!' said he, showing an auriferous tooth, 'we have quite a number of the Western
delegates stopping here.' He struck a bell for the boy

I endeavoured to give colour to my rôle. 'There is an important movement on foot among us

Westerners,' I said, 'in regard to a recommendation to the convention that the bottles containing
the tartrate of antimony and potash, and the tartrate of sodium and potash, be kept in a contiguous
position on the shelf.'

'Gentleman to three-fourteen,' said the clerk hastily. I was whisked away to my room.

The next day I bought a trunk and clothing, and began to live the life of Edward Pinkhammer. I
did not tax my brain with endeavours to solve problems of the past.

It was a piquant and sparkling cup that the great island city held up to my lips. I drank of it
gratefully. The keys of Manhattan belong to him who is able to bear them. You must be either the
city's guest or its victim.

The following few days were as gold and silver. Edward Pinkhammer, yet counting back to his
birth by hours only, knew the rare joy of having come upon so diverting a world full-fledged and
unrestrained. I sat entranced on the magic carpets provided in theatres and roof-gardens, that
transported one into strange and delightful lands full of frolicsome music, pretty girls and
grotesque, drolly extravagant parodies upon humankind. I went here and there at my own dear
will, bound by no limits of space,
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time or comportment. I dined in weird cabarets, at weirder tables d'hôte to the sound of Hungarian
music and the wild shouts of mercurial artists and sculptors. Or, again, where the night life
quivers in the electric glare like a kinetoscopic picture, and the millinery of the world, and its
jewels, and the ones whom they adorn, and the men who make all three possible are met for good
cheer and the spectacular effect. And among all these scenes that I have mentioned I learned one
thing that I never knew before. And that is that the key to liberty is not in the hands of Licence,
but Convention holds it. Comity has a toll-gate at which you must pay, or you may not enter the
land of Freedom. In all the glitter, the seeming disorder, the parade, the abandon, I saw this law,
unobtrusive, yet like iron, prevail. Therefore, in Manhattan you must obey these unwritten laws,
and then you will be freest of the free. If you decline to be bound by them, you put on shackles.

Sometimes, as my mood urged me, I would seek the stately, softly murmuring palm-rooms,
redolent with high-born life and delicate restraint, in which to dine. Again I would go down to the
waterways in steamers packed with vociferous, bedecked, unchecked, love-making clerks and
shop-girls to their crude pleasures on the island shores. And there was always Broadway -
glistening, opulent, wily, varying, desirable Broadway - growing upon one like an opium habit.

One afternoon as I entered my hotel a stout man with a big nose and a black moustache blocked
my way in the corridor. When I would have passed around him, he greeted me with offensive
familiarity.

'Hallo, Bellford!' he cried loudly. 'What the deuce are you doing in New York? Didn't know
anything could drag you away from that old book den of yours. Is Mrs. B. along or is this a little
business run alone, eh?'

'You have made a mistake, sir,' I said coldly, releasing my hand from his grasp. 'My name is
Pinkhammer. You will excuse me.' The man dropped to one side, apparently astonished. As I
walked to the clerk's desk I heard him call to a bell-boy and say something about telegraph
blanks.

'You will give me my bill,' I said to the clerk, 'and have my baggage brought down in half an
hour. I do not care to remain where I am annoyed by confidence men.' I moved that afternoon to
another hotel, a sedate, old-fashioned one on lower Fifth Avenue. There was a restaurant a little
way off Broadway where one
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could be served almost alfresco in a tropic array of screening flora. Quiet and luxury and a
perfect service made it an ideal place in which to take luncheon or refreshment. One afternoon I
was there picking my way to a table among the ferns when I felt my sleeve caught.

'Mr. Bellford!' exclaimed an amazingly sweet voice. I turned quickly to see a lady seated alone -
a lady of about thirty, with exceedingly handsome eyes, who looked at me as though I had been
her very dear friend.

'You were about to pass me,' she said accusingly. 'Don't tell me you did not know me. Why
should we not shake hands - at least once in fifteen years?'

I shook hands with her at once. I took a chair opposite her at the table. I summoned with my
eyebrows a hovering waiter. The lady was philandering with an orange ice. I ordered a crème de
menthe. Her hair was reddish bronze. You could not look at it, because you could not look away
from her eyes. But you were conscious of it as you are conscious of sunset while you look into the
profundities of a wood at twilight.

'Are you sure you know me?' I asked.

'No,' she said, smiling, 'I was never sure of that.'

'What would you think,' I said, a little anxiously, 'if I were to tell you that my name is Edward
Pinkhammer, from Cornopolis, Kansas.'

'What would I think?' she repeated, with a merry glance. 'Why, that you had not brought Mrs.
Bellford to New York with you, of course. I do wish you had. I would have liked to see Marian.'
Her voice lowered slightly - 'You haven't changed much, Elwyn.

' I felt her wonderful eyes searching mine and my face more closely.

'Yes, you have,' she amended, and there was a soft, exultant note in her latest tones; 'I see it now.
You haven't forgotten. You haven't forgotten for a year or a day or an hour. I told you you never
could.

' I poked my straw anxiously in the crème de menthe. 'I'm sure I beg your pardon,' I said, a little
uneasy at her gaze. 'But that is just the trouble. I have forgotten. I've forgotten everything.

' She flouted my denial. She laughed deliciously at something she seemed to see in my face.

'I've heard of you at times,' she went on. 'You're quite a big lawyer out West - Denver, isn't it, or
Los Angeles? Marian must
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be very proud of you. You knew, I suppose, that I married six months after you did. You may
have seen it in the papers. The flowers alone cost two thousand dollars.

' She had mentioned fifteen years. Fifteen years is a long time. 'Would it be too late,' I asked
somewhat timorously, 'to offer you congratulations?'

'Not if you dare do it,' she answered, with such fine intrepidity that I was silent, and began to
crease patterns on the cloth with my thumb-nail.

'Tell me one thing,' she said, leaning toward me rather eagerly - 'a thing I have wanted to know
for many years - just from a woman's curiosity, of course - have you ever dared since that night to
touch, smell or look at white roses - at white roses wet with rain and dew?'

I took a sip of crème de menthe.

It would be useless, I suppose,' I said, with a sigh, 'for me to repeat that I have no recollection at
all about these things. My memory is completely at fault. I need not say how much I regret it.

' The lady rested her arms upon the table, and again her eyes disdained my words and went
travelling by their own route direct to my soul. She laughed softly, with a strange quality in the
sound - it was a laugh of happiness yes, and of content - and of misery. I tried to look away from
her.

'You lie, Elwyn Bellford,' she breathed blissfully. 'Oh, I know you lie!'

I gazed dully into the ferns.

'My name is Edward Pinkhammer,' I said. 'I came with the delegates to the Druggists' National
Convention. There is a movement on foot for arranging a new position for the bottles of tartrate of
antimony and tartrate of potash, in which, very likely, you would take little interest.'

A shining landau stopped before the entrance. The lady rose. I took her hand, and bowed.

'I am deeply sorry,' I said to her, 'that I cannot remember. I could explain, but fear you would not
understand. You will not concede Pinkhammer; and I really cannot at all conceive of the - the
roses and other things.'

'Good-bye, Mr. Bellford,' she said, with her happy, sorrowful smile, as she stepped into her
carriage.

I attended the theatre that night. When I returned to my hotel, a quiet man in dark clothes, who
seemed interested in rubbing his
305 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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

'Mr. Pinkhammer,' he said casually, giving the bulk of his attention to his forefinger, 'may I
request you to step aside with me for a little conversation? There is a room here.'

'Certainly,' I answered.

He conducted me into a small, private parlour. A lady and a gentleman were there. The lady, I
surmised, would have been unusually good-looking had her features not been clouded by an
expression of keen worry and fatigue. She was of a style of figure and possessed colouring and
features that were agreeable to my fancy. She was in a travelling-dress; she fixed upon me an
earnest look of extreme anxiety, and pressed an unsteady hand to her bosom. I think she would
have started forward, but the gentleman arrested her movement with an authoritative motion of
his hand. He then came, himself, to meet me. He was a man of forty, a little grey about the
temples, and with a strong, thoughtful face.

'Bellford, old man,' he said cordially, 'I'm glad to see you again. Of course we know everything is
all right. I warned you, you know, that you were overdoing it. Now, you'll go back with us, and be
yourself again in no time.

' I smiled ironically.

I have been “Bellforded " so often,' I said, 'that it has lost its edge. Still, in the end, it may grow
wearisome. Would you be willing at all to entertain the hypothesis that my name is Edward
Pinkhammer, and that I never saw you before in my life?' Before the man could reply a wailing
cry came from the woman. She sprang past his detaining arm. 'Elwyn!' she sobbed, and cast
herself upon me, and clung tight. 'Elwyn,' she cried again, 'don't break my heart. I am your wife -
call my name once - just once! I could see you dead rather than this way.

I unwound her arms respectfully, but firmly.

'Madam,' I said severely, 'pardon me if I suggest that you accept a resemblance too precipitately.
It is a pity,' I went on, with an amused laugh, as the thought occurred to me, 'that this Bellford and
I could not be kept side by side upon the same shelf like tartrates of sodium and antimony for
purposes of identification. In order to understand the allusion,' I concluded airily, 'it may be
necessary for you to keep an eye on the proceedings of the Druggists' National Convention.

' The lady turned to her companion, and grasped his arm.

'What is it, Doctor Volney? Oh, what is it?' she moaned.

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He led her to the door.

'Go to your room for awhile,' I heard him say. 'I will remain and talk with him. His mind? No, I think not -
only a portion of the brain. Yes, I am sure he will recover. Go to your room and leave me with him.

' The lady disappeared. The man in dark clothes also went outside, still manicuring himself in a thoughtful
way. I think he waited in the hall.

'I would like to talk with you a while, Mr. Pinkhammer, if I may,' said the gentleman who remained. 'Very
well, if you care to,' I replied, 'and will excuse me if I take it comfortably; I am rather tired.' I stretched
myself upon a couch by a window and lit a cigar. He drew a chair near by.

'Let us speak to the point,' he said soothingly. 'Your name is not Pinkhammer.'
'I know that as well as you do,' I said coolly. 'But a man must have a name of some sort. I can assure you
that I do not extravagantly admire the name of Pinkhammer. But when one christens one's self, suddenly
the fine names do not seem to suggest themselves. But suppose it had been Scheringhausen or
Scroggins! I think I did very well with Pinkhammer.'

'Your name,' said the other man seriously, 'is Elwyn C. Bellford. You are one of the first lawyers in Denver.
You are suffering from an attack of aphasia, which has caused you to forget your identity. The cause of it
was over-application to your profession, and, perhaps, a life too bare of natural recreation and pleasures.
The lady who has just left the room is your wife.'
'She is what I would call a fine-looking woman,' I said, after a judicial pause. 'I particularly admire the
shade of brown in her hair.'
'She is a wife to be proud of. Since your disappearance, nearly two weeks ago, she has scarcely closed her
eyes. We learned that you were in New York through a telegram sent by Isidore Newman, a travelling
man from Denver. He said that he had met you in an hotel here, and that you did not recognize him.'

'I think I remember the occasion,' I said. 'The fellow called me "Bellford," if I am not mistaken. But don't
you think it about time, now, for you to introduce yourself?

'I am Robert Volney - Doctor Volney. I have been your close friend for twenty years, and your physician
for fifteen. I came with Mrs. Bellford to trace you as soon as we got the telegram. Try, Elwyn, old man -
try to remember!'
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 307

'What's the use to try!' I asked, with a little frown. 'You say you are a physician. Is aphasia curable? When a
man loses his memory, does it return slowly, or suddenly?'

'Sometimes gradually and imperfectly; sometimes as suddenly as it went.'

'Will you undertake the treatment of my case, Doctor Volney?' I asked.

'Old friend,' said he, 'I'll do everything in my power, and will have done everything that science can do to
cure you.'

'Very well,' said I. 'Then you will consider that I am your patient. Everything is in confidence now -
professional confidence.' 'Of course,' said Doctor Volney.

I got up from the couch. Someone had set a vase of white roses on the centre table - a cluster of white roses
freshly sprinkled and fragrant. I threw them far out of the window, and then I laid myself upon the couch
again.

'It will be best, Bobby,' I said, 'to have this cure happen suddenly. I'm rather tired of it all, anyway. You may
go now and bring Marian in. But, oh, Doc,' I said, with a sigh, as I kicked him on the shin - 'good old Doc - it
was glorious!'

A Municipal Report

The cities are full of pride,

Challenging each to each –

This from her mountainside,

That from her burthened beach

R. KIPLING.

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

EAST IS EAST, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are
not merely inhabitants of a State. They are the Southerners of the West. Now, Chicagoans are no less loyal to
their city; but when you ask them why, they stammer and speak of lake fish and the new Odd Fellows
Building. But Californians go into detail.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 308

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

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

I stepped off the train at 8 p.m. Having searched the thesaurus in vain for adjectives, I must, as a substitution,
hie me to comparison in the form of a recipe.

Take of London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts; gas leaks 20 parts; dewdrops, gathered in a brickyard at
sunrise, 25 parts; odour of honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix.

The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a Nashville drizzle. It is not so fragrant as a moth-ball
nor as thick as pea-soup; but 'tis enough - 'twill serve.

I went to an hotel in a tumbril. It required strong self-suppression for me to keep from climbing to the top of
it and giving an imitation of Sidney Carton. The vehicle was drawn by beasts of a bygone era and driven by
something dark and emancipated.

I was sleepy and tired, so when I got to the hotel I hurriedly paid it the fifty cents it demanded (with
approximate lagniappe, I assure you). I knew its habits; and I did not want to hear it prate about its old
'marster' or anything that happened 'befo' de wah.' The hotel was one of the kind described as 'renovated.'
That means $20,000 worth of new marble pillars, tiling, electric lights and brass cuspidors in the lobby, and a
new L. & N. time table and a lithograph of Lookout Mountain in each one of the great rooms above. The
management was without reproach, the attention full of exquisite Southern courtesy, the service as slow as
the progress of a snail and as good-humoured as Rip Van Winkle. The food was worth travelling a thousand
miles for. There is no
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 309

other hotel in the world where you can get such chicken livers en brochette.

At dinner I asked a negro waiter if there was anything doing in town. He pondered gravely for a minute, and
then replied: 'Well, boss, I don't really reckon there's anything at all doin' after sundown.

' Sundown had been accomplished; it had been drowned in the drizzle long before. So that spectacle was
denied me. But I went forth upon the streets in the drizzle to see what might be there.

It is built on undulating grounds; and the streets are lighted by electricity at a cost of $32,470 per annum

As I left the hotel there was a race riot. Down upon me charged a company of freedmen, or Arabs, or Zulus,
armed with - no, I saw with relief that they were not rifles, but whips. And I saw dimly a caravan of black,
clumsy vehicles; and at the reassuring shouts, 'Kyar you anywhere in the town, boss, fuh fifty cents,' I
reasoned that I was merely a 'fare' instead of a victim.

I walked through long streets, all leading uphill. I wondered how those streets ever came down again.
Perhaps they didn't until they were 'graded.' On a few of the 'main streets' I saw lights in stores here and
there; saw street-cars go by conveying worthy burghers hither and yon; saw people pass engaged in the art
of conversation, and heard a burst of semi-lively laughter issuing from a soda-water and ice-cream parlour.
The streets other than 'main' seemed to have enticed upon their borders houses consecrated to peace and
domesticity. In many of them lights shone behind discreetly drawn window shades; in a few pianos tinkled
orderly and irreproachable music. There was, indeed, little 'doing.' I wished I had come before sundown. So I
returned to my hotel.

In November, 1864, the Confederate General Hood advanced against Nashville, where he shut up a National
force under General Thomas. The latter then sallied forth and defeated the confederates in a terrible conflict.

All my life I have heard of, admired, and witnessed the fine markmanship of the South in its peaceful conflicts
in the tobaccochewing regions. But in my hotel a surprise awaited me. There were twelve bright, new,
imposing, capacious brass cuspidors in the great lobby, tall enough to be called urns and so widemouthed
that the crack pitcher of a lady baseball team should
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 310

have been able to throw a ball into one of them at five paces distant. But, although a terrible battle had raged
and was still raging, the enemy had not suffered. Bright, new, imposing, capacious, untouched, they stood. But
shades of Jefferson Brick! the tile floor - the beautiful tile floor! I could not avoid thinking of the battle of
Nashville, and trying to draw, as is my foolish habit, some deductions about hereditary markmanship.

Here I first saw Major (by misplaced courtesy) Wentworth Caswell. I knew him for a type the moment my eyes
suffered from the sight of him. A rat has no geographical habitat. My old friend, A. Tennyson, said, as he so well
said almost everything:

Prophet, curse me the blabbing lip,

And curse me the British vermin, the rat.'

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

This man was hunting about the hotel lobby like a starved dog that had forgotten where he had buried a bone. He
had a face of great acreage, red, pulpy, and with a kind of sleepy massiveness like that of Buddha. He possessed
one single virtue - he was very smoothly shaven. The mark of the beast is not indelible upon a man until he goes
about with a stubble. I think that if he had not used his razor that day I would have repulsed his advances, and
the criminal calendar of the world would have been spared the addition of one murder

I desire to interpolate here that I am a Southerner. But I am not one by profession or trade. I eschew the string
tie, the slouch hat, the Prince Albert, the number of bales of cotton destroyed by Sherman, and plug chewing.
When the orchestra plays Dixie I do not cheer. I slide a little lower on the leather-cornered seat and, well, order
another Würzburger and wish that Longstreet had - but what's the use?

Major Caswell banged the bar with his fist, and the first gun at Fort Sumter re-echoed. When he fired the last one
at Appomattox
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 311

I began to hope. But then he began on family trees, and demonstrated that Adam was only a third cousin of a
collateral branch of the Caswell family. Genealogy disposed of, he took up, to my distaste, his private family
matters. He spoke of his wife, traced her descent back to Eve, and profanely denied any possible rumour that she
may have had relations in the land of Nod.

By this time I began to suspect that he was trying to obscure by noise the fact that he had ordered the drinks, on
the chance that I would be bewildered into paying for them. But when they were down he crashed a silver dollar
loudly upon the bar. Then, of course, another serving was obligatory. And when I had paid for that I took leave of
him brusquely; for I wanted no more of him. But before I had obtained my release he had prated loudly of an
income that his wife received, and showed a handful of silver money

When I got my key at the desk the clerk said to me courteously: 'If that man Caswell has annoyed you, and if you
would like to make a complaint, we will have him ejected. He is a nuisance, a loafer, and without any known
means of support, although he seems to have some money most the time. But we don't seem to be able to hit
upon any means of throwing him out legally.'

'Why, no,' said I, after some reflection; 'I don't see my way clear to making a complaint. But I would like to place
myself on record as asserting that I do not care for his company. Your town,' I continued, 'seems to be a quiet
one. What manner of entertainment, adventure, or excitement have you to offer to the stranger within your
gates?'

'Well, sir,' said the clerk, 'there will be a show here next Thursday. It is - I'll look it up and have the announcement
sent up to your room with the ice water. Good night.

' After I went up to my room I looked out of the window. It was only about ten o'clock, but I looked upon a silent
town. The drizzle continued, spangled with dim lights, as far apart as currants in a cake sold at the Ladies'
Exchange.

'A quiet place,' I said to myself, as my first shoe struck the ceiling of the occupant of the room beneath mine.
'Nothing of the life here that gives colour and variety to the cities in the East and West. Just a good, ordinary,
humdrum business town.'

Nashville occupies a foremost place among the manufacturing centres of the country. It is the fifth boot and shoe
market in the United States, the largest candy and cracker manufacturing city in the South, and does an
enormous wholesale dry goods, grocery and drug business.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 312

I must tell you how I came to be in Nashville, and assure you the digression brings as much tedium to me as it
does to you. I was travelling elsewhere on my own business, but I had a commission from a Northern literary
magazine to stop over there and establish a personal connection between the publication and one of its
contributors, Azalea Adair.

Adair (there was no clue to the personality except the handwriting) had sent in some essays (lost art!) and
poems that had made the editors swear approvingly over their one o'clock luncheon. So they had commissioned
me to round up said Adair and corner by contract his or her output at two cents a word before some other
publisher offered her ten or twenty.

At nine o'clock the next morning, after my chicken livers en brochette (try them if you can find that hotel), I
strayed out into the drizzle, which was still on for an unlimited run. At the first corner I came upon Uncle Cæsar.
He was a stalwart negro, older than the pyramids, with grey wool and a face that reminded me of Brutus, and a
second afterwards of the late King Cetewayo. He wore the most remarkable coat that I ever had seen or expect to
see. It reached to his ankles and had once been a Confederate grey in colours. But rain and sun and age had so
variegated it that Joseph's coat, beside it, would have faded to a pale monochrome. I must linger with that coat
for it has to do with the story - the story that is so long in coming, because you can hardly expect anything to
happen in Nashville.

Once it must have been the military coat of an officer. The cape of it had vanished, but all adown its front it had
been frogged and tasselled magnificently. But now the frogs and tassels were gone. In their stead had been
patiently stitched (I surmised by some surviving 'black mammy') new frogs made of cunningly twisted common
hempen twine. This twine was frayed and dishevelled. It must have been added to the coat as a substitute for
vanished splendours, with tasteless but painstaking devotion, for it followed faithfully the curves of the long-
missing frogs. And, to complete the comedy and pathos of the garment, all its buttons were gone save one. The
second button from the top alone remained. The coat was fastened by other twine strings tied through the
buttonholes and other holes rudely pierced in the opposite side. There was never such a weird garment so
fantastically bedecked and of so many mottled hues. The lone button was the size of a half-dollar, made of yellow
horn and sewed on with coarse twine.

This negro stood by a carriage so old that Ham himself might

 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 313

have started a hack line with it after he left the ark with the two animals hitched to it. As I approached he threw
open the door, drew out a leather duster, waved it, without using it, and said in deep, rumbling tones:

'Step right in, suh; ain't a speck of dust in it - jus' back from a funeral, suh.'

I inferred that on such gala occasions carriages were given an extra cleaning. I looked up and down the street
and perceived that there was little choice among the vehicles for hire that lined the kerb. I looked in my
memorandum book for the address of Azalea Adair

'I want to go to 861 Jessamine Street,' I said, and was about to step into the hack. But for an instant the thick,
long, gorilla-like arm of the old negro barred me. On his massive and saturnine face a look of sudden suspicion
and enmity flashed for a moment. Then, with quickly returning conviction, he asked blandishingly: 'What are you
gwine there for, boss?'

'What are you gwine there for, boss?'

'What is that to you?' I asked a little sharply.

'Nothin', suh, jus' nothin'. Only it's a lonesome kind of part of town and few folks ever has business out there.
Step right in. The seats is clean - jes' got back from a funeral, suh.'

A mile and a half it must have been to our journey's end. I could hear nothing but the fearful rattle of the ancient
hack over the uneven brick paving; I could smell nothing but the drizzle, now further flavoured with coal smoke
and something like a mixture of tar and oleander blossoms. All I could see through the streaming windows were
two rows of dim houses.

The city has an area of 10 square miles; 181 miles of streets, of which 137 miles are paved; a system of
waterworks that cost $2,000,000, with 77 miles of mains.

Eight-sixty-one Jessamine Street was a decayed mansion. Thirty yards back from the street it stood, outmerged
in a splendid grove of trees and untrimmed shrubbery. A row of box bushes overflowed and almost hid the paling
fence from sight; the gate was kept closed by a rope noose that encircled the gate-post and the first paling of the
gate. But when you got inside you saw that 861 was a shell, a shadow, a ghost of former grandeur and excellence.
But in the story, I have not yet got inside

When the hack had ceased from rattling and the weary quadrupeds came to a rest I handed my jehu his fifty
cents with an
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 314

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

'It's two dollars, suh,' he said.

'How's that?' I asked. 'I plainly heard you call out at the hotel: "Fifty cents to any part of the town." '

'It's two dollars, suh,' he repeated obstinately. 'It's a long ways from the hotel.'

'It is within the city limits and well within them,' I argued. 'Don't think that you have picked up a greenhorn
Yankee. Do you see those hills over there?' I went on, pointing toward the east (I could not see them, myself, for
the drizzle); 'well, I was born and raised on their other side. You old fool nigger, can't you tell people from other
people when you see em?'

The grim face of King Cetewayo softened. 'Is you from the South, suh? I reckon it was them shoes of yourn fooled
me. There is somethin' sharp in the toes for a Southern gen'l'man to wear.' 'Then the charge is fifty cents, I
suppose?' said I inexorably. His former expression, a mingling of cupidity and hostility, returned, remained ten
minutes, and vanished.

'Boss,' he said, 'fifty cents is right; but I needs two dollars, suh; I'm obleeged to have two dollars. I ain't demandin'
it now, suh; after I knows whar you's from; I'm jus' sayin' that I has to have two dollars to-night, and business is
mighty po'.

Peace and confidence settled upon his heavy features. He had been luckier than he had hoped. Instead of having
picked up a greenhorn, ignorant of rates, he had come upon an inheritance. 'You confounded old rascal,' I said,
reaching down into my pocket, 'you ought to be turned over to the police.'

For the first time I saw him smile. He knew; he knew; HE KNEW. I gave him two one-dollar bills. As I handed them
over I noticed that one of them had seen parlous times. Its upper right-hand corner was missing, and it had been
torn through in the middle but joined again. A strip of blue tissue-paper, pasted over the split, preserved its
negotiability.

Enough of the African bandit for the present: I left him happy, lifted the rope and opened the creaky gate.

The house, as I said, was a shell. A paint-brush had not touched it in twenty years. I could not see why a strong
wind should not have bowled it over like a house of cards until I looked again at the trees that hugged it close -
the trees that saw the battle of Nashville and still drew their protecting branches around it against storm and
enemy and cold.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 315

Azalea Adair, fifty years old, white-haired, a descendant of the cavaliers, as thin and frail as the house she lived in,
robed in the cheapest and cleanest dress I ever saw, with an air as simple as a queen's, received me.

The reception-room seemed a mile square, because there was nothing in it except some rows of books, on
unpainted, white-pine bookshelves, a cracked, marble-top table, a rag rug, a hairless horsehair sofa and two or
three chairs. Yes, there was a picture on the wall, a coloured crayon drawing of a cluster of pansies. I looked
around for the portrait of Andrew Jackson and the pine-cone hanging basket, but they were not there.

Azalea Adair and I had conversation, a little of which will be repeated to you. She was a product of the old South,
gently nurtured in the sheltered life. Her learning was not broad, but was deep and of splendid originality in its
somewhat narrow scope. She had been educated at home, and her knowledge of the world was derived from
inference and by inspiration. Of such is the precious, small group of essayists made. While she talked to me, I
kept brushing my fingers, trying, unconsciously, to rid them guiltily of the absent dust from the half-calf backs of
Lamb, Chaucer, Hazlitt, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne and Hood. She was exquisite, she was a valuable discovery.
Nearly everybody nowadays knows too much - oh, so much too much - of real life.

I could perceive clearly that Azalea Adair was very poor. A house and a dress she had, not much else, I fancied.
So, divided between my duty to the magazine and my loyalty to the poets and essayists who fought Thomas in
the valley of the Cumberland, I listened to her voice, which was like a harpsichord's, and found that I could not
speak of contracts. In the presence of the Nine Muses and the Three Graces one hesitated to lower the topic to
two cents. There would have to be another colloquy after I had regained my commercialism. But I spoke of my
mission, and three o'clock of the next afternoon was set for the discussion of the business proposition.

'Your town,' I said, as I began to make ready to depart (which is the time for smooth generalities), 'seems to be a
quiet, sedate place. A home town, I should say, where few things out of the ordinary ever happen.'

It carries on an extensive trade in stoves and hollow ware with the West and South, and its flouring mills have a
daily capacity of more than 2,000 barrels.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 316

Azalea Adair seemed to reflect.

'I have never thought of it that way,' she said, with a kind of sincere intensity that seemed to belong to her. 'Isn't
it in the still, quiet places that things do happen? I fancy that when God began to create the earth on the first
Monday morning one could have leaned out one's windows and heard the drop of mud splashing from His trowel
as He built up the everlasting hills. What did the noisiest project in the world - I mean the building of the tower of
Babel - result in finally? A page and a half of Esperanto in the North American Review.'

'Of course,' said I platitudinously, 'human nature is the same everywhere; but there is more colour - er - more
drama and movement and - er - romance in some cities than in others.'

'Of course,' said I platitudinously, 'human nature is the same everywhere; but there is more colour - er - more
drama and movement and - er - romance in some cities than in others.' 'On the surface,' said Azalea Adair. 'I have
travelled many times around the world in a golden airship wafted on two wings - print and dreams. I have seen
(on one of my imaginary tours) the Sultan of Turkey bow-string with his own hands one of his wives who had
uncovered her face in public. I have seen a man in Nashville tear up his theatre tickets because his wife was going
out with her face covered - with rice powder. In San Francisco's Chinatown I saw the slave girl Sing Yee dipped
slowly, inch by inch, in boiling almond oil to make her swear she would never see her American lover again. She
gave in when the boiling oil had reached three inches above her knee. At a euchre party in East Nashville the
other night I saw Kitty Morgan cut dead by seven of her schoolmates and lifelong friends because she had
married a house painter. The boiling oil was sizzling as high as her heart; but I wish you could have seen the fine
little smile that she carried from table to table. Oh yes, it is a humdrum town. Just a few miles of redbrick houses
and mud and stores and lumber yards.'

Someone knocked hollowly at the back of the house. Azalea Adair breathed a soft apology and went to
investigate the sound. She came back in three minutes with brightened eyes, a faint flush on her cheeks, and ten
years lifted from her shoulders.

'You must have a cup of tea before you go,' she said, 'and a sugar cake.

' She reached and shook a little iron bell. In shuffled a small negro girl about twelve, bare-foot, not very tidy,
glowering at me with thumb in mouth and bulging eyes.

Azalea Adair opened a tiny, worn purse and drew out a dollar bill, a dollar bill with the upper right-hand corner
missing, torn in
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 317

two pieces and pasted together again with a strip of blue tissuepaper. It was one of the bills I had given the
piratical negro - there was no doubt of it.

'Go up to Mr. Baker's store on the corner, Impy,' she said, handing the girl the dollar bill, 'and get a quarter of a
pound of tea - the kind he always sends me - and ten cents worth of sugar cakes. Now, hurry. The supply of tea in
the house happens to be exhausted,' she explained to me.

Impy left by the back way. Before the scrape of her hard, bare feet had died away on the back porch, a wild
shriek - I was sure it was hers - filled the hollow house. Then the deep, gruff tones of an angry man's voice
mingled with the girl's further squeals and unintelligible words.

Azalea Adair rose without surprise or emotion and disappeared. For two minutes I heard the hoarse rumble of
the man's voice; then something like an oath and a light scuffle, and she returned calmly to her chair.

'This is a roomy house,' she said, 'and I have a tenant for part of it. I am sorry to have to rescind my invitation to
tea. It was impossible to get the kind I always use at the store. Perhaps to-morrow Mr. Baker will be able to
supply me.'

I was sure that Impy had not had time to leave the house. I inquired concerning street-car lines and took my
leave. After I was well on my way I remembered that I had not learned Azalea Adair's name. But to-morrow
would do.

That same day I started in on the course of iniquity that this uneventful city forced upon me. I was in the town
only two days, but in that time I managed to lie shamelessly by telegraph, and to be an accomplice - after the
fact, if that is the correct legal term - to a murder.

As I rounded the corner nearest my hotel the Afrite coachman of the polychromatic, nonpareil coat seized me,
swung open the dungeony door of his peripatetic sarcophagus, flirted his feather duster and began his ritual:
'Step right in, boss. Carriage is clean - jus' got back from a funeral. Fifty cents to any - ' And then he knew me and
grinned broadly. ' 'Scuse me, boss; you is de gen'l'man what rid out with me dis mawnin'. Thank you kindly, suh.'

'I am going out to 861 again to-morrow afternoon at three,' said I, 'and if you will be here, I'll let you drive me. So
you know Miss Adair?' I concluded, thinking of my dollar bill. 'I belonged to her father, Judge Adair, suh,' he
replied.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 318

'I judge that she is pretty poor,' I said. 'She hasn't much money to speak of, has she?'

For an instant I looked again at the fierce countenance of King Cetewayo, and then he changed back to an
extortionate old negro hack-driver.
'She a'n't gwine to starve, suh,' he said slowly. 'She has reso'ces,

suh; she has reso'ces.' 'I shall pay you fifty cents for the trip,' said I.

'Dat is puffeckly correct, suh,' he answered humbly; 'I jus' had to have dat two dollars dis mawnin, boss.' I went
to the hotel and lied by electricity. I wired the magazine: 'A. Adair holds out for eight cents a word.'

The answer that came back was: 'Give it to her quick, you duffer.'

Just before dinner 'Major' Wentworth Caswell bore down upon me with the greetings of a long-lost friend. I have
seen few men whom I have so instantaneously hated, and of whom it was so difficult to be rid. I was standing at
the bar when he invaded me; therefore I could not wave the white ribbon in his face. I would have paid gladly for
the drinks, hoping thereby to escape another, but he was one of those despicable, roaring, advertising bibbers
who must have brass bands and fireworks attend upon every cent that they waste in their follies.

With an air of producing millions he drew two one-dollar bills from a pocket and dashed one of them upon the
bar. I looked once more at the dollar bill with the upper right-hand corner missing, torn through the middle, and
patched with a strip of blue tissue-paper. It was my dollar bill again. It could have been no other.

I went up to my room. The drizzle and the monotony of a dreary, eventless Southern town had made me tired
and listless. I remember that just before I went to bed I mentally disposed of the mysterious dollar bill (which
might have formed the clue to a tremendously fine detective story of San Francisco) by saying to myself sleepily:
'Seems as if a lot of people here own stock in the Hack-Driver's Trust. Pays dividends promptly, too. Wonder if - '
Then I fell asleep.

King Cetewayo was at his post the next day, and rattled my bones over the stones out to 861. He was to wait and
rattle me back again when I was ready.

Azalea Adair looked paler and cleaner and frailer than she had looked on the day before. After she had signed the
contract at eight cents per word she grew still paler and began to slip out of her chair.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 319

Without much trouble I managed to get her up on the antediluvian horsehair sofa and then I ran out to the
sidewalk and yelled to the coffee-coloured Pirate to bring a doctor. With a wisdom that I had not suspected in
him, he abandoned his team and struck off up the street afoot, realizing the value of speed. In ten minutes he
returned with a grave, grey-haired and capable man of medicine. In a few words (worth much less than eight
cents each) I explained to him my presence in the hollow house of mystery. He bowed with stately
understanding, and turned to the old negro.

'Uncle Cæsar,' he said calmly, 'run up to my house and ask Miss Lucy to give you a cream pitcher full of fresh milk
and half a tumbler of port wine. And hurry back. Don't drive - run. I want you to get back some time this week.'

It occurred to me that Dr. Merriman also felt a distrust as to the speeding powers of the landpirate's steeds. After
Uncle Cæsar was gone, lumberingly, but swiftly, up the street, the doctor looked me over with great politeness
and as much careful calculation until he had decided that I might do.

Mrs. Caswell!' said I, in surprise. And then I looked at the contract and saw that she had signed it 'Azalea Adair
Caswell.' 'I thought she was Miss Adair,' I said.

'Married to a drunken, worthless loafer, sir,' said the doctor. 'It is said that he robs her even of the small sums
that her old servant contributes toward her support.'

When the milk and wine had been brought, the doctor soon revived Azalea Adair. She sat up and talked of the
beauty of the autumn leaves that were then in season, and their height of colour. She referred lightly to her
fainting seizure as the outcome of an old palpitation of the heart. Impy fanned her as she lay on the sofa. The
doctor was due elsewhere, and I followed him to the door. I told him that it was within my power and intentions
to make a reasonable advance of money to Azalea Adair on future contributions to the magazine, and he seemed
pleased.

'By the way,' he said, 'perhaps you would like to know that you have had royalty for a coachman. Old Cæsar's
grandfather was a king in Congo. Cæsar himself has royal ways, as you may have observed.'
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 320

As the doctor was moving off I heard Uncle Cæsar's voice inside: 'Did he git bofe of dem two dollars from you,
Mis' Zalea?' 'Yes, Cæsar,' I heard Azalea Adair answer weakly. And then I went in and concluded business
negotiations with our contributor. I assumed the responsibility of advancing fifty dollars, putting it as a necessary
formality in binding our bargain. And then Uncle Cæsar drove me back to the hotel.

Here ends all the story as far as I can testify as a witness. The rest must be only bare statements of facts.

At about six o'clock I went out for a stroll. Uncle Cæsar was at his corner. He threw open the door of his carriage,
flourished his duster and began his depressing formula: 'Step right in, suh. Fifty cents to anywhere in the city -
hack's puffickly clean, suh - jus' got back from a funeral - '

And then he recognized me. I think his eyesight was getting bad. His coat had taken on a few more faded shades
of colour, the twine strings were more frayed and ragged, the last remaining button - the button of yellow horn -
was gone. A motley descendant of kings was Uncle Caesar.

About two hours later I saw an excited crowd besieging the front of a drug store. In a desert where nothing
happens this was manna; so I edged my way inside. On an extemporized couch of empty boxes and chairs was
stretched the mortal corporeality of Major Wentworth Caswell. A doctor was testing him for the immortal
ingredient. His decision was that it was conspicuous by its absence.

The erstwhile Major had been found dead on a dark street and brought by curious and ennuied citizens to the
drug store. The late human being had been engaged in terrific battle - the details showed that. Loafer and
reprobate though he had been, he had been also a warrior. But he had lost. His hands were yet clenched so
tightly that his fingers would not be opened. The gentle citizens who had known him stood about and searched
their vocabularies to find some good words, if it were possible, to speak of him. One kind-looking man said, after
much thought: 'When "Cas" was about fo'teen he was one of the best spellers in school.'

While I stood there the fingers of the right hand of 'the man that was,' which hung down the side of a white pine
box, relaxed, and dropped something at my feet. I covered it with one foot quietly, and a little later on I picked it
up and pocketed it. I reasoned that in his last struggle his hand must have seized that object unwittingly and held
it in a death-grip.
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 321

At the hotel that night the main topic of conversation, with the possible exceptions of politics and prohibition,
was the demise of Major Caswell. I heard one man say to a group of listeners:

'In my opinion, gentlemen, Caswell was murdered by some of these no-account niggers for his money. He had
fifty dollars this afternoon which he showed to several gentlemen in the hotel. When he was found the money
was not on his person.

' I left the city the next morning at nine, and as the train was crossing the bridge over the Cumberland River I took
out of my pocket a yellow, horn, overcoat button the size of a fifty-cent piece, with frayed ends of coarse twine
hanging from it, and cast it out of the window into the slow, muddy waters below. I wonder what's doing in
Buffalo!

LI

Compliments of the Season

THERE ARE NO MORE Christmas stories to write. Fiction is exhausted; and newspaper items the next best, are
manufactured by clever young Journalists who have married early and have an engagingly pessimistic view of life.
Therefore, for seasonable diversion, we are reduced to two very questionable sources - facts and philosophy. We
will begin with - whichever you choose to call it.

Children are pestilential little animals with which we have to cope under a bewildering variety of conditions.
Especially when childish sorrows overwhelm them are we put to our wits' end. We exhaust our paltry store of
consolation; and then beat them, sobbing, to sleep. Then we grovel in the dust of a million years, and ask God
why. Thus we call out of the rat-trap. As for the children, no one understands them except old maids,
hunchbacks, and shepherd dogs.

Now come the facts in the case of the Rag-Doll, the Tatterdemalion, and the Twenty-fifth of December.

On the tenth of that month the Child of the Millionaire lost her rag-doll. There were many servants in the
Millionaire's palace on the Hudson, and these ransacked the house and grounds, but without finding the lost
treasure. The Child was a girl of five, and one of those perverse little beasts that often wound the sensibilities of
wealthy parents by fixing their affections upon some vulgar,
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 329

'P-pardon, lady,' he said, 'but couldn't leave without exchangin' comp'ments sheason with lady th' house. ' 'Gainst
princ'ples gen'leman do sho.'

And then he began the ancient salutation that was a tradition in the House when men wore lace ruffles and
powder. 'The blessings of another year - '

Fuzzy's memory failed him. The Lady prompted:

'- Be upon this hearth.'

'- The guest - ' stammered Fuzzy.

'- And upon her who - ' continued the Lady, with a leading smile.

'Oh, cut it out,' said Fuzzy ill-manneredly. 'I can't remember. Drink hearty.

' Fuzzy had shot his arrow. They drank. The Lady smiled again the smile of her caste. James enveloped Fuzzy and
re-conducted him toward the front door. The harp music still softly drifted through the house.

Outside, Black Riley breathed on his cold hands and hugged the gate.

gate. 'I wonder,' said the Lady to herself, musing 'who - but there were so many who came. I wonder whether
memory is a curse or a blessing to them after they have fallen so low.'

Fuzzy and his escort were nearly at the door. The Lady called: 'James!'

James stalked back obsequiously, leaving Fuzzy waiting unsteadily, with his brief spark of the divine fire gone.

Outside, Black Riley stamped his cold feet and got a firmer grip on his section of gas-pipe.

'You will conduct this gentleman,' said the Lady, 'downstairs. Then tell Louis to get out the Mercedes and take
him to whatever place he wishes to go.'

LII

Proof of the Pudding

SPRING WINKED a vitreous optic at Editor Westbrook, of the Minerva Magazine, and deflected him from his
course. He had lunched in his favourite corner of a Broadway hotel, and was returning to his office when his feet
became entangled in the lure of the vernal coquette. Which is by way of saying that he turned eastward in
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 330

Twenty-sixth Street, safely forded the spring freshet of vehicles in Fifth Avenue, and meandered along the walks
of budding Madison Square.

The lenient air and the settings of the little park almost formed a pastoral; the colour motif was green - the
presiding shade at the creation of man and vegetation.

The callow grass between the walks was the colour of verdigris, a poisonous green, reminiscent of the horde of
derelict humans that had breathed upon the soil during the summer and autumn. The bursting tree-buds looked
strangely familiar to those who had botanized among the garnishings of the fish course of a forty-cent dinner.
The sky above was of that pale aquamarine tint that hallroom poets rhyme with 'true' and 'Sue' and 'coo.' The
one natural and frank colour visible was the ostensible green of the newly painted benches - a shade between
the colour of a pickled cucumber and that of a last year's fast-back cravenette raincoat. But, to the city-bred eye
of Editor Westbrook, the landscape appeared a masterpiece.

And now, whether you are of those who rush in, or of the gentle concourse that fears to tread, you must follow in
a brief invasion of the editor's mind.

Editor Westbrook's spirit was contented and serene. The April number of the Minerva had sold its entire edition
before the tenth day of the month - a newsdealer in Keokuk had written that he could have sold fifty copies more
if he had had 'em. The owners of the magazine had raised his (the editor's) salary; he had just installed in his
home a jewel of a recently imported cook who was afraid of policemen; and the morning papers had published in
full a speech he had made at a publishers' banquet. Also there were echoing in his mind the jubilant notes of a
splendid song that his charming young wife had sung to him before he left his uptown apartment that morning.
She was taking enthusiastic interest in her music of late, practising early and diligently. When he had
complimented her on the improvement in her voice she had fairly hugged him for joy at his praise. He felt, too,
the benign, tonic medicament of the trained nurse, Spring, tripping softly adown the wards of the convalescent
city.

While Editor Westbrook was sauntering between rows of park benches (already filling with vagrants and the
guardians of lawless childhood) he felt his sleeve grasped and held. Suspecting that he was about to be
panhandled, he turned a cold and unprofitable face, and saw that his captor was - Dawe - Shackleford Dawe,
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 331

dingy, almost ragged, the genteel scarcely visible in him through the deeper lines of the shabby. While the editor
is pulling himself out of his surprise, a flashlight biography of Dawe is offered.

He was a fiction writer, and one of Westbrook's old acquaintances. At one time they might have called each other
old friends. Dawe had some money in those days, and lived in a decent apartment-house near Westbrook's. The
two families often went to theatres and dinners together. Mrs. Dawe and Mrs. Westbrook became 'dearest'
friends. Then one day a little tentacle of the octopus, just to amuse itself, ingurgitated Dawe's capital, and he
moved to the Gramercy Park neighbourhood, where one, for a few groats per week, may sit upon one's trunk
under eightbranched chandeliers and opposite Carrara marble mantels and watch the mice play upon the floor.
Dawe thought to live by writing fiction. Now and then he sold a story. He submitted many to Westbrook. The
Minerva printed one or two of them; the rest were returned. Westbrook sent a careful and conscientious
personal letter with each rejected manuscript, pointing out in detail his reasons for considering it unavailable.
Editor Westbrook had his own clear conception of what constituted good fiction. So had Dawe. Mrs. Dawe was
mainly concerned about the constituents of the scanty dishes of food that she managed to scrape together. One
day Dawe had been spouting to her about the excellences of certain French writers. At dinner they sat down to a
dish that a hungry schoolboy could have encompassed at a gulp. Dawe commented.

'It's Maupassant hash,' said Mrs. Dawe. 'It may not be art, but I do wish you would do a five course Marion
Crawford serial with an Ella Wheeler Wilcox sonnet for dessert. I'm hungry.' As far as this from success was
Shackleford Dawe when he plucked Editor Westbrook's sleeve in Madison Square. That was the first time the
editor had seen Dawe in several months.

'Why, Shack, is this you?' said Westbrook somewhat awkwardly, for the form of this phrase seemed to touch
upon the other's changed appearance.

'Sit down for a minute,' said Dawe, tugging at his sleeve. 'This is my office. I can't come to yours, looking as I do.
Oh, sit down - you won't be disgraced. Those half-plucked birds on the other benches will take you for a swell
porch-climber. They won't know you are only an editor.'

'Smoke, Shack?' said Editor Westbrook, sinking cautiously

 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 332

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

Dawe snapped at the cigar as a kingfisher darts at a sunperch, or a girl pecks at a chocolate cream.

'I have just - ' began the edit

'Oh, I know; don't finish,' said Dawe. 'Give me a match. You have just ten minutes to spare. How did you manage
to get past my office-boy and invade my sanctum? There he goes now, throwing his club at a dog that couldn't
read the "Keep off the Grass" signs.

' 'How goes the writing?' asked the editor.

'Look at me,' said Dawe, 'for your answer. Now don't put on that embarrassed, friendly-but-honest look and ask
me why I don't get a job as a wine agent or a cab-driver. I'm in the fight to a finish. I know I can write good fiction
and I'll force you fellows to admit it yet. I'll make you change the spelling of "regrets" to "c-h-e-q-u-e" before I'm
done with you.'

Editor Westbrook gazed through his nose-glasses with a sweetly sorrowful, omniscient, sympathetic, sceptical
expression - the copyrighted expression of the editor beleaguered by the unavailable contributor.

'Have you read the last story I sent you - "The Alarum of the Soul"?' asked Dawe.

'Carefully. I hesitated over that story, Shack, really I did. It had some good points. I was writing you a letter to
send with it when it goes back to you. I regret - '

'Never mind the regrets,' said Dawe grimly. 'There's neither salve nor sting in 'em any more. What I want to know
is why. Come, now; out with the good points first.'

'The story,' said Westbrook deliberately, after a suppressed sigh, 'is written around an almost original plot.
Characterization - the best you have done. Construction - almost as good, except for a few weak joints which
might be strengthened by a few changes and touches. It was a good story, except - '

'I can write English, can't I?' interrupted Dawe.

'I have always told you,' said the editor, 'that you had a style.

' 'Then the trouble is the –

' 'Same old thing,' said Editor Westbrook. 'You work up to your climax like an artist. And then you turn yourself
into a photographer. I don't know what form of obstinate madness possesses you, Shack, but that is what you do
with everything that you write. No, I will retract the comparison with the photographer. Now
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 333

and then photography, in spite of its impossible perspective, manages to record a fleeting glimpse of truth. But
you spoil every denouement by those flat, drab, obliterating strokes of your brush that I have so often
complained of. If you would rise to the literary pinnacle of your dramatic scenes, and paint them in the high
colours that art requires, the postman would leave fewer bulky, -addressed envelopes at your door.'

'Oh, fiddles and footlights!' cried Dawe derisively. 'You've got that old sawmill drama kink in your brain yet. When
the man with the black moustache kidnaps golden-haired Bessie you are bound to have the mother kneel and
raise her hands in the spotlight and say: "May high heaven witness that I will rest neither night nor day till the
heartless villain that has stolen me child feels the weight of a mother's vengeance!" '

Editor Westbrook conceded a smile of impervious complacency. 'I think,' said he, 'that in real life the woman
would express herself in those words or in very similar ones.'

'Not in a six hundred nights' run anywhere but on the stage,' said Dawe hotly. 'I'll tell you what she'd say in real
life. She'd say: "What! Bessie led away by a strange man? Good Lord! It's one trouble after another! Get my other
hat, I must hurry around to the police-station. Why wasn't somebody looking after her, I'd like to know? For
God's sake, get out of my way or I'll never get ready. Not that hat - the brown one with the velvet bows. Bessie
must have been crazy; she's usually shy of strangers. Is that too much powder? Lordy! How I'm upset!"

'That's the way she'd talk,' continued Dawe. 'People in real life don't fly into heroics and blank verse at emotional
crises. They simply can't do it. If they talk at all on such occasions they draw from the same vocabulary that they
use every day, and muddle up their words and ideas a little more, that's all.'

'Shack,' said Editor Westbrook impressively, 'did you ever pick up the mangled and lifeless form of a child from
under the fender of a street-car, and carry it in your arms and lay it down before the distracted mother? Did you
ever do that and listen to the words of grief and despair as they flowed spontaneously from her lips?' 'I never
did,' said Dawe. 'Did you?'

'Well, no,' said Editor Westbrook, with a slight frown. 'But I can well imagine what she would say.

' 'So can I,' said Dawe.

And now the fitting time had come for Editor Westbrook to play the oracle and silence his opinionated
contributor. It was not for an
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 334

unarrived fictionist to dictate words to be uttered by the heroes and heroines of the Minerva Magazine, contrary
to the theories of the editor thereof.

My dear Shack,' said he, 'if I know anything of life I know that every sudden, deep and tragic emotion in the
human heart calls forth an apposite, concordant, conformable, and proportionate expression of feeling? How
much of this inevitable accord between expression and feeling should be attributed to nature, and how much to
the influence of art, it would be difficult to say. The sublimely terrible roar of the lioness that has been deprived
of her cubs is dramatically as far above her customary whine and purr as the kingly and transcendent utterances
of Lear are above the level of his senile vapourings. But it is also true that all men and women have what may be
called a subconscious dramatic sense that is awakened by a sufficiently deep and powerful emotion - a sense
unconsciously acquired from literature and the stage that prompts them to express those emotions in language
befitting their importance and histrionic value.'

'And in the name of seven sacred saddle-blankets of Sagittarius, where did the stage and literature get the stunt?'
asked Dawe. 'From life,' answered the editor triumphantly

The story-writer rose from the bench and gesticulated eloquently but dumbly. He was beggared for words with
which to formulate adequately his dissent.

On a bench near by a frowsy loafer opened his red eyes and perceived that his moral support was due to a down-
trodden brother.

'Punch him one, Jack,' he called hoarsely to Dawe. 'Wat's he come makin' a noise like a penny arcade for amongst
gen'lemen that comes in the Square to set and think?'

Editor Westbrook looked at his watch with an affected show of leisure.

'Tell me,' asked Dawe, with truculent anxiety, 'what especial faults in "The Alarum of the Soul" caused you to
throw it down.' 'When Gabriel Murray,' said Westbrook, 'goes to his telephone and is told that his fiancée has
been shot by a burglar, he says - I do not recall the exact words, but - '

'I do,' said Dawe. 'He says: "Damn Central; she always cuts me off." (And then to his friend): "Say, Tommy, does a
thirty-two bullet make a big hole? It's kind of hard luck, ain't it? Could you get me a drink from the sideboard,
Tommy? No; straight; nothing on the side." '
 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES 335

'And again,' continued the editor, without pausing for argument, 'when Berenice opens the letter from her
husband informing her that he has fled with the manicure girl, her words are - let me see - '

'She says,' interposed the author: ' "Well, what do you think of that!" '

'Absurdly inappropriate words,' said Westbrook, 'presenting an anti-climax - plunging the story into hopeless
bathos. Worse yet; they mirror life falsely. No human being ever uttered banal colloquialisms when confronted by
sudden tragedy.'

'Wrong,' said Dawe, closing his unshaven jaws doggedly. 'I say no man or woman ever spouts highfalutin talk
when they go up against a real climax. They talk naturally, and a little worse.' The editor rose from the bench with
his air of indulgence and inside information.

'Say, Westbrook,' said Dawe, pinning him by the lapel, 'would you have accepted "The Alarum of the Soul" if you
had believed that the actions and words of the characters were true to life in the parts of the story that we
discussed?'

'It is very likely that I would, if I believed that way,' said the editor. 'But I have explained to you that I do not.'

'If I could prove to you that I am right?'

'I'm sorry, Shack, but I'm afraid I haven't time to argue any further just now.'

'I don't want to argue,' said Dawe. 'I want to demonstrate to you from life itself that my view is the correct one.'

'How could you do that?' asked Westbrook in a surprised tone. 'Listen,' said the writer seriously. 'I have thought
of a way. It is important to me that my theory of true-to-life fiction be recognized as correct by the magazines.
I've fought for it for three years, and I'm down to my last dollar, with two months' rent due.' 'I have applied the
opposite of your theory,' said the editor, 'in selecting the fiction for the Minerva Magazine. The circulation has
gone up from ninety thousand to - '

'Four hundred thousand,' said Dawe. 'Whereas it should have been boosted to a million.'

'You said something to me just now about demonstrating your pet theory.'
'I will. If you'll give me about half an hour of your time I'll prove to you that I am right. I'll prove it by Louise.'

'Your wife!' exclaimed Westbrook. 'How?'

'Well, not exactly by her, but with her,' said Dawe. 'Now, you
'Your wife!' exclaimed Westbrook. 'How?' 'Well, not exactly by her, but with her,' said Dawe. 'Now, you