men, his over-flowing generosity, his utter indifference to caste, in a word a large share of his characteristic and ineradicable democracy. To the same source may also be ascribed, through association at least, some of O. Henry's constructive ingenuity.

Doctor Porter was for several years the best-known and the best-loved physician in Guilford County. An old friend* of his, to whom the memory of Doctor Porter brought tears, said recently: "He was the best-hearted man I ever knew; honest, high-toned, and generous. Rain or shine, sick or well, he would visit the poorest family in the county. He would have been a rich man if he had collected a half of what was due him. His iron-gray hair and the shape of his head reminded you of Zeb Vance." His office, like his father's before him, became a sort of general repair shop, though in a different way. "I shall never forget," said the late Joe Reece, editor of the Daily Record of Greensboro, "something that happened in my boyhood. A giant of a negro had been cut down the back in a street fight. He passed me making straight for Doctor Porter's office, and yelling like a steam piano. Everybody in those days when they got hurt made for Doctor Porter's office as straight as a June shad in fly-time. When I got to the little office, I'll be john-squizzled if Alg. Porter didn't have that darky down on the floor.

David Scott.

He was sitting on him and sewing him up and lecturing to him about the evils of intemperance all at the same time. He lectured sort o' unsteadily on that theme but nobody could beat his sewing."

A few of the older citizens kept Doctor Porter as their physician to the last in spite of his lessening interest in the practice of medicine. "I never knew his equal," said one.* "You got better as soon as he entered the room. He was the soul of humour and geniality and resourcefulness and all my children were devoted to him."

My own memory of Doctor Porter is of a small man with a huge head and a long beard; quiet, gentle, softvoiced, self-effacing, who looked at you as if from another world and who walked with a step so noiseless, so absolutely echo-less, as to attract attention. This characteristic was also inherited by O. Henry who always seemed to me to be treading on down. They used to say of Doctor Porter that he had a far more scientific knowledge of medicine and drugs than any other physician in the community. He had studied under Dr. David P. Weir, in whose drug store he had clerked, and for a time he lectured on chemistry at the Edgeworth Female Seminary, of which Doctor Weir was principal from 1844 to 1845.

Doctor Porter's interests, however, became more and

Mrs. Robert P. Dick.

more absorbed in fruitless inventions and remained less and less with the problems or with the actual practice of medicine. A perpetual motion waterwheel, a new-fangled churn, a washing machine, a flying machine, a horseless carriage to be run by steam, and a cotton-picking contrivance that was to take the place of negro labour became obsessions with him. In the winter time his room would be littered with wooden wheels and things piled under the bed, but in the summer time he moved or was moved out to the barn. In one of his last interviews O. Henry said that he often found himself recalling the days when as a boy he used to lie prone and dreaming on the old barn floor while his father worked quietly and assiduously on his perpetual motion water-wheel. "He was so absent-minded," O. Henry said, "that he would frequently start out without his hat and we would be sent to carry it to him." A schoolmate* of O. Henry writes of those days:

Will [O. Henry] was a great lover of fun and mischief. When we were quite small his father, Dr. A. S. Porter, fell a victim to the delusion that he had solved the problem of perpetual motion, and finally abandoned a splendid practice and spent nearly all his time working on his machines. His mother, who was a most practical and sensible old woman, made him betake himself and his machines to the barn, and these Will and I, always being careful to wait for a time when the doctor was out, would proceed to demolish, destroying often in a few minutes that which it had

John H. Dillard, of Murphy, N. C.

taken much time and labor to construct. While, of course, I do not know the fact, I strongly suspect that the doctor's mother inspired these outrages.

Scientists distinguish three kinds of inheritance. In the case of "blended" inheritance, the child, like a folk-song, bears the marks of composite authorship; in "prepotent" inheritance, one parent or remoter ancestor is supposed to be most effective in stamping the offspring; and in "exclusive" inheritance, the character of the descendant is definitely that of one ancestor. Though the classification rests on no wellestablished basis and illustrates the use of three obedient adjectives rather than the operation of ascertained laws, it is at least convenient and may serve pro tem till a wiser survey replaces it. It is easy to see that O. Henry was the beneficiary not of an exclusive but of a blended inheritance. "This is a country," he reminds us, "of mix-ups." But the mother strain, if not prepotent in the sense of science, seems to me to have outweighed that of any other relative of whom we have record.

CHAPTER

FOUR

7

BIRTHPLACE AND EARLY YEARS

O. HENRY once wrote from New York:

I was born and raised in "No'th Ca'llina" and at eighteen went to Texas and ran wild on the prairies. Wild yet, but not so wild. Can't get to loving New Yorkers. Live all alone in a great big two rooms on quiet old Irving Place three doors from Wash. Irving's old home. Kind of lonesome. Was thinking lately (since the April moon commenced to shine) how I'd like to be down South, where I could happen over to Miss Ethel's or Miss Sallie's and sit down on the porch-not on a chair on the edge of the porch, and lay my straw hat on the steps and lay my head back against the honeysuckle on the post-and just talk. And Miss Ethel would go in directly (they say "presently" up here) and bring out the guitar. She would complain that the E string was broken, but no one would believe her; and pretty soon all of us would be singing the "Swanee River" and "In the Evening by the Moonlight" and-oh, gol darn it, what's the use of wishing?

These words, in which O. Henry almost succeeds in expressing the inexpressible, are cited by Miss Marguerite Campion in Harper's Weekly* as an example of "charm." "For charm," she says, "is three parts softness. Did not O. Henry, almost more than any other American writer, possess it, and was he not, until the day of his death, the soft-hearted advocate

*For November 27, 1915.