more personal here. His slang is one of the few features of his style of which he seems pridefully aware. He is lavish in his use of it and seems to have worked it up with a collector's zest. His objective attitude toward slang is apparent in Cabbages and Kings. An American agent of a Central American revolution, wishing to communicate with his principal in another city by telegram and fearing detection if he employs either of the two languages at his command, English and Spanish, has recourse to slang with this result: "His nibs skedaddled yesterday per jack rabbit line with all the coin in the kitty and the bundle of muslin he's spoony about. The boodle is six figures short. Our crowd in good shape, but we need the spondulicks. You collar it; the main guy and the dry goods are headed for the briny. You know what to do."

By Courier is another story based on O. Henry's relish for slang and his amusement over its possibilities. A lover, seeing his lady love on a park bench, while suffering her displeasure and forbidden to speak or write to her, sends her an oral petition by a messenger boy. The boy grasps the idea of his patron and translates it to the lady in startling slang. She understands well enough to reply and does so in exquisite terms. Her message shorn of its fine phrases is delivered to her lover in street-urchin English. His answer, in spite of, or perhaps because of the fantastic garb in which it reaches the

lady, wins from her this condescension: "Tell the guy on the other bench that his girl wants him."

Words and their ways in newspapers, is the basis for a story in which O. Henry makes a Chinese war correspondent send his New York paper an important but cryptic message which defies E. A. Poe's keys, but is at last interpreted by a clever member of the staff who discovers that the meaning is to be ascertained by substituting for the word used its spouse in newspaper phraseology. If foregone is used, conclusion must be read; if preconcerted is used, arrangement is meant; for rash substitute act; for select, few, etc.

He makes a show of uncertainty regarding timehonored stumblingblocks in usage; as, "Mathematics are or is-Thanks, old subscriber." Literary and historic references are part of O. Henry's stock in trade; but if he prides himself on his slang he treats his authors with jocose familiarity. "I don't mean the Cooper, Beadle, cigar-store, or Laughing Water kind; I mean the modern Indian." As a rule he does not label his quotations or misquotations, "East is East and West is San Francisco according to Californians. '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." "It is not so fragrant as a moth ball nor yet so thick as pea soup, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve." If the

reader does not know his Kipling, his Rubaiyat, his Romeo, he is not made aware of the defect by O. Henry. If he does, he has his reward. If O. Henry refers to an author, it is when the quotation is familiar, and with affected doubt: "The poet Longfellow-or was it Confucius, the inventor of wisdom?-remarked,

"Life is real: life is earnest

And things are not what they seem."

If an authority is unrevered, like Rand, McNally, he treats him with formality and respect; if honored, with a show of condescension: "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," and so on.

A nonchalance of manner, studied perhaps but in effect natural, gives to much of O. Henry's work the strength of easy power. There is no sense of strain, no hint of realization of difficulty. With how little show of exertion he secures a dynamic effect in his account of the Cossack's rescue of the child from a runaway automobile! "Demeter sprang for Joe. He glided upon the horse's bare back like a snake and shouted something at him like the crack of a dozen whips. One of the firemen afterwards swore

that Joe answered him back in the same language. Ten seconds after the auto started the big horse was eating up the asphalt behind it like a strip of macaroni. Some people two blocks and a half away saw the rescue. They said the auto was nothing but a drab noise with a black speck in the middle of it for Chris, when a big bay horse with a lizard lying on its back cantered up alongside of it and the lizard reached over and picked the black speck out of the noise." The writer seems sufficiently impressed by the superlative character of the performance, but seems untroubled by any resulting inadequacy of words. Instead of giving the impression that he has found the one only word to do justice to the idea, he gives the impression of having chosen at random the words that came and that other and even better inspirations were possible. The impression he gives of being a little lazy, of not making a supreme effort on behalf of his story, gives his extravagant style something the effect of moderation in expression. Freed from the suspicion of the writer's anxiety to impress, the reader invests the narrative with the force of a "plain, unvarnished tale" that confronts the reader with bare facts. His economy of effort, in effect, neutralizes his extravagance in language.

O. Henry's air of ease is in some part due to his availing himself freely of beaten paths and short cuts. Ideas that have worn a groove to the sources

of laughter he makes to serve. In writing about the Southerners he touches the keys that the wag and the sentimentalist have played upon successfully for generations: the pride of family, the unfailing reference to "before the war," chivalry to women, the titled condition of the Southerner, the negro's preference of Southern arrogance to Northern democracy, tobacco, family feuds, deliberateness, feminine charm, masculine daring, all are alike utilized to recreate without effort of writer or reader the old familiar South.

If his characters are not typical Southerners or Westerners, or New Yorkers, they are at least typical human beings, with enough bad in the best and enough good in the worst to make them brothers all. His reprobates are likable, and his shopgirls are amusing rather than disgusting in spite of their folly, because they are for the most part types and types cannot be taken so seriously as individual men and women.

The pun, explicit and implicit, "shades of Jefferson-brick," the hyperbole, "a reception room a mile square," "a negro older than the pyramids," the furtive paradox, "the horseless horsehair sofa," "Old Cæsar" the negro driver who "looked like Brutus," "A quiet place,' I said to myself as my first shoe struck the ceiling of the occupant of the room below me," mock elevation of style, "the Afrite coachman of the polychromatic nonpareil coat," "the dun