himself recalling the days when as a boy he used to lie sprawling and dreaming on the old barn floor in Greensboro while his father worked quietly and assiduously on his perpetual motion water wheel.

But the strongest influence brought to bear on O. Henry during his life in North Carolina was the influence of his aunt, Miss Evelina Maria Porter, known by everyone as Miss Lina. The death of his mother when he was only three years of age and the increasing absorption of his father in fruitless inventions resulted in Miss Lina's taking the place of both parents, and this she did not only with whole-souled devotion but with rare and efficient intelligence. Her little school room on the Porter premises has long been torn down but it still lives in the grateful memory of all who attended it and has attained a new immortality in the fame of its most brilliant pupil. O. Henry attended no other school and he attended this only to the age of fifteen. Miss Lina did not spare the rod but I have never known a pupil of her school, whether doctor, teacher, preacher, lawyer, or judge, who did not say that every application of the rod, so far as he was concerned, was amply and urgently deserved. To have been soundly whipped by Miss Lina is still regarded in Greensboro as a sort of spiritual bond of union, linking together the citizens of the town in a community of cutaneous experience, for which they would not exchange a college diploma.

But we are more concerned here with Miss Lina's method of teaching literature. She had a method and O. Henry's lifelong love of good books was the fruitage of her method. She did not teach the history of literature but she labored in season and out of season to have her pupils assimilate the spirit of literature. Her reading in the best English literature was, if not wide, at least intimate and appreciative. She loved books as she loved flowers, because her nature demanded them. Fiction and poetry were her means of widening and enriching her own inner life, not of learning facts about the world without. She did not measure literature by life but life by literature. I have often

thought that Miss Lina must have been in O. Henry's thought when he wrote those suggestive words about Azalea Adair in "A Municipal Report:" "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."

Miss Lina used regularly to gather her boys about her at recess and read to them from some classic author. When she saw that she had caught their interest she would announce a Friday night meeting in the school room at which they would pop corn and roast chestnuts and she would continue the readings. "I did more reading," says O. Henry, "between my thirteenth and nineteenth years than I have done in all the years since and my taste at that time was much better than it is now, for I used to read nothing but the classics. Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy' and Lane's translation of "The Arabian Nights' were my favorites." During his busy years in New York he often remarked to Mrs. Porter: "I never have time to read now. I did all my reading before I was twenty." This did not, of course, refer to newspapers which he devoured three or four times a day.

But Miss Lina believed that the best way to learn or to appreciate the art of narration was to try your hand at it yourself. You might never become a great writer but you would at least have a first hand acquaintance with the discipline that well-knit narrative involves. In the intervals, therefore, between chestnut roastings and classic readings an original story would be started, everyone present having to make an impromptu contribution when called on. Each contribution, being expected to grow naturally out of the incidents that preceded it, demanded of course the closest attention to all that had hitherto been said. The most difficult rôle in this narrative program fell of course to the pupil who tried to halt the windings of the story by an interesting and adequate conclusion. To do this required not

only a memory that retained vividly the incidents and characters already projected into the story but a constructive imagination that could interpret and fuse them. Need I say that the creator of "The Four Million" found his keenest delight in this exercise or that his contributions were those most eagerly awaited by teacher and pupil?

But when O. Henry's boyhood friends recall him it is not as a pupil in Miss Lina's school; nor is it as the writer in the great city, whose stories count their readers by the million. It is as the clerk in his uncle Clark Porter's drug store on Main Street. Here he was known and loved by old and young, black and white, rich and poor. He was the wag of the town, but so quiet, so unobtrusive, so apparently preoccupied that it was his pencil rather than his tongue that spread his local fame. His feeling for the ludicrous, for the odd, for the distinctive, in speech, tone, appearance, conduct, or character responded instantly to the appeal made by the drug store constituency. Not that he was not witty: he was. But his best things were said with the pencil. There was not a man or woman in the town whom he could not reproduce recognizably with a few strokes of a lead pencil, though he never took a lesson in drawing. Thus it was a common occurrence, when Mr. Clark Porter returned to the store from lunch, for a conversation like this to take place. O. Henry would say: "Uncle Clark, a man called to see you a little while ago to pay a bill." It should be premised that it was not good form in those days to ask a man to stand and deliver either his name or the amount due. "Who was it?" Mr. Porter would ask. "I never saw him before but he looks like this," and the pencil would dash up and down a piece of wrapping paper. "O, that's Bill Jenkins out here at Reedy Fork. He owes me $7.25."

His pencil sketches sometimes gave offence, especially when some admirer would hang them in the store window, but rarely. He was absolutely without malice. There was about him also. a gentleness of manner, a delicacy of feeling, a refinement in speech and demeanor that was as much a part of him as his humor. No one who knew him in the old days could be surprised at the indignation with which in later years he resented

the constant comparison of his work with that of De Maupassant, though he kept a copy of De Maupassant always at hand. No two writers ever lived more diametrically opposed than O. Henry and De Maupassant except in technique. "I have been called," he said, "the American De Maupassant. Well, I never wrote a filthy word in my life, and I don't like to be compared to a filthy writer." Vulgarity was never funny to him; it was only disgusting. Like Edgar Allan Poe, with whom he had little else in common, O. Henry was honored during his whole life with the understanding friendship of a few noble-spirited women who, in the early days as in the later, helped, I think, to keep his compass true.

George Eliot in "Romola" tells of the part played in medieval Florence by the barber shop. A somewhat analogous part was played in Greensboro a generation ago by the drug store. Greensboro itself, it may be said, was more than a typical small town. Its widely patronized law school and schools for women, the standing of its preachers and judges, its graded school which was the first to be established in the State, its nearness to the Revolutionary battle field of Guilford Court House, its varied though limited produce due to its mid-state situation, and the comparative absence of violent political antagonisms made it a good town to be born in and a wholesome town to live in. It contained not more than five thousand inhabitants but the drug store was the rendezvous of all classes. It was in fact the social, political, and anecdotal clearing house of the town. The patronage of the grocery stores and dry goods stores was controlled in part by denominational lines, but everybody patronized the drug store. It was also a sort of physical confessional. The man who would expend only a few words in purchasing a ham or a hat would talk half an hour of his aches. and ills or those of his family before buying twenty-five cents worth of pills or a ten cent bottle of liniment. When the ham or the hat was paid for and taken away there was usually an end of it. Not so with the pills or the liniment. The patient usually came back to continue his personal or family history and to add a sketch of the character and conduct of the pills or liniment. All this was grist to O. Henry's mill.

No man, I think, without a training similar to O. Henry's, would be likely to write such a story as "Makes the Whole World Kin." A burglar, you remember, has entered a house at night. "Hold up both your hands," he said. "Can't raise the other one," was the reply. "What's the matter with it?" "Rheumatism in the shoulder." "Inflammatory?" asked the burglar. "Was. The inflammation has gone down." "'Scuse me," said the burglar, "but it just soaked me one, too." "How long have you had it?" inquired the citizen. "Four years." "Ever try rattlesnake oil?" asked the citizen. "Gallons. If all the snakes I've used the oil of was strung out in a row they'd reach eight times as far as Saturn, and the rattles could be heard at Valparaiso, Indiana, and back." In the end the burglar helps the citizen to dress and they go out together, the burglar standing treat.

The drawings that O. Henry used to make of the characters that frequented the drug store were not caricatures. There was usually, it is true, an over-emphasis put upon some one trait but this trait was the central trait, the over-emphasis serving only to interpret and reveal the character as a whole. Examining these sketches anew, when the characters themselves are thirty odd years older than they were then, one is struck with the resemblance still existing. In fact O. Henry's sketches reproduce the characters as they are today more faithfully than do the photographs taken at the same time. The photographs have been outgrown, but not the sketches; for the sketches. caught the central and permanent, while the photographs made no distinction. In O. Henry's story called "A Madison Square Arabian Night" an artist, picked at random from the "free-bed line," is made to say: "Whenever I finished a picture people would come to see it, and whisper and look queerly at one another. I soon found out what the trouble was. I had a knack of bringing out in the face of a portrait the hidden character of the original. I don't know how I did it-I painted what I saw."

III.

In 1882, at the age of twenty, O. Henry moved from Greensboro to Texas. His life in Texas has been succinctly told in the