STATUE SONG Idol of my race I sing, Humbly kneeling at thy shrine. Humbly kneeling at thy shrine, Let me chant my idol song, Beloved let me lay these at thy feet These flowers of forgetfulness so sweet. Forsake thou thoughts of other days and pride, And come thou back with me, thine Indian bride, Return to me Thine own predestined bride. "Little Old Main Street" is a protest and natural reaction from the wave of Broadway and Little-Old-New-York songs which for so long inundated longsuffering Oshkosh and Kalamazoo. LITTLE OLD MAIN STREET Singers may boast about Broadway, And they most gen'rally do: Spring all that flowery fluff on the Bowery Take it. I'll stake it to you; Call me a yap if you care to, Say I'm a rube or a shine, But give me the street that has got 'em all beat— Little old Main Street for mine. Little old Main Street for mine! Take a look at the lovers in line Three village charmers and twenty-eight farmers, Little old Main Street for mine, When you're back with the pigs and the kine, Sing if you must of your State Street, Sing of the Bois and the Strand, And if you have a new song of the Avenue, Sing of the streets of the city, Not for Yours Truly-"Uh, Uh!" But give me the street of the village élite; Little old Main Street for mine, And right down by the Post Office sign Hear 'em say, "Well, what a long rainy spell! Little old Main Street for mine, Where it's dead at a quarter past nine See the folks flock past the Opry-House block, "It's the Little Things that Count," even in the success of a musical comedy. A few trifles like the following would have gone far toward making a Broadway Success. IT'S THE LITTLE THINGS THAT COUNT Girl- Little drops of water, little grains of sand, Boy Little drops of seltzer, little drops of rye, Make the pleasant highball, when a man is dry. Both-It's the little things that count, ev'rywhere you go; O. HENRY IN HIS OWN BAGDAD By George Jean Nathan IN the summer of 1908 William Sydney Porter and Robert Hobart Davis, alias "O. Henry" and "Bob" Davis respectively-and likewise respectively one of the greatest of American short-story writers and one of the greatest rejectors of all species of stories-were discussing the merits and demerits of New York City during the tropical, asphalt-smelly season. "Let's get out of it for a few days," suggested Davis. "I'll take you to a wonderful place down on Long Island, where the fishing is immense and the fish correspondingly large.' "Well," said Henry, "New York is a bit warm and I'll just take you up." They started. They arrived. Fishing tackle was put in order; collars and coats were cast aside; Henry expressed admiration at the ability of the masculine natives to expectorate tobacco juice "as far as the eye could see"; Davis lit a cigar; and the expedition was off. It was a mile walk. "We won't ride, because the exercise will do us good," suggested Davis. Henry assented. The day was gray-blue and sizzling. They had not gone more than three city blocks when Henry was already drenched with perspiration. But he kept on manfully. A little way farther on, however, Davis noticed that his companion was desperately endeavoring to find something in his trousers' pockets. "What are you looking for?" he asked. "I am looking for my return ticket to New York,” replied Henry, positively, "and let me tell you that as soon as I find it, I'm going to take a 'hitch' on a wagon and go back-fast! I know it's blamed hot in town, but there are just as good fish left on the menu as there are in the sea." "Bagdad," as O. Henry referred to New York in his modern Arabian Nights, was, in his own words to a close friend, "the cosy haven for everybody, including amateur fishermen and other disappointed persons." O. Henry loved the metropolis, and its intense heat or cold made little change in his affection for it. "If you like the city so well, then," he was once asked, "why do you live in Asheville so much of the time?" "Because," he answered, "New York gets into my veins so strongly that I have to go away from it when I want to work. For the same reason, I venture, that a man who is deeply in love with a woman can't think of anything but that woman when he is anywhere near her." During his frequent visits in his own sky-scraper-filled Bagdad, this literary Haroun-al-Raschid prowled about in curious corners, brushed up against curious individuals, and ferreted out curious secrets, curious heart mysteries, and curious little lights on the human machine-all of which subsequently found their way into his stories. Some of his adventures while Haroun-al-Raschiding must, therefore, possess interest for the vast reading throng that has smiled and felt a tear while turning his pages. It was during one of his prowling tours several years ago that O. Henry, with H. H. McClure, who suggested the writing of the modern Arabian Nights tales to the short-story king, was seated in a Broadway restaurant at luncheon. "What are you going to do to-night?" asked McClure. "I'm going to persuade a 'hobo' to give me three hundred dollars," answered the writer. "On a bet?" asked McClure. "Not at all," replied O. Henry "that's the price of a story and I'm going to rub up against some tramps down on the Bowery until one of them suggests the plot to me." That night O. Henry did travel downtown and started on a Haroun-al-Raschid expedition in the vicinity of the famous bread-line. His genial, well-fleshed personality always stood him in good stead, and no matter how tough the community he chanced to enter, unpleasantness of any sort was a rare occurrence. When he talked with a "hobo" he was a "hobo." When he talked with a railroad president he was a railroad president. O. Henry was a chameleon of conversation and of what is known colloquially as "front." He always took on the air-it seemed-of the person to whom he was talking. One of his friends has said of him that there was no better "mixer" in the world-and the truth of the statement is borne out by a survey of the intimate and varied insight revealed in his diverse writings. On the night in question O. Henry moved around among the Bowery derelicts until he finally got into touch with a typical "bum." They strolled down the street a way together and asked a passer-by for the time. "Almost midnight," said the latter. "Gee," remarked Henry to his tattered companion. "I feel like a cup o' coffee. Come on, I've got a quarter and we'll blow some of it in this place." They entered the dingy eating-house, sat up to the counter and each ordered a cup of coffee and a ham sandwich. Although the two men had now been together for some time, the short-story writer had detected the gleam of nothing definite in the tramp that promised to provide the "copy" he was seeking. But he felt sure he had picked his man right and he felt equally sure that the fellow sooner or later would unconsciously suggest to him something or other by which he would profit. O. Henry rarely "led" the conversation. He preferred to let it come naturally. He said nothing to his companion, who was busily concerning himself with the food before him. When they had finished and had reached the street, Henry suggested that they walk leisurely up the Bowery and see if there was anything to be seen. They wandered around aimlessly for fully an hour and a half and then Henry said he felt like having another cup of coffee. The two men went into another eating-place and ordered two cups of coffee-at two cents a cup. Then they walked around some more, but still Henry had succeeded in getting no idea from his bedraggled companion. Finally, tired out, he told the latter he was going to leave him. He reached out his hand to "shake" with the tramp and, as their hands met, Henry suddenly surprised the "hobo" by laughing. "What's up, cull?" asked the latter. “Oh, nothin',” replied Henry, "I just thought of something." This was true, as he afterward confessed, the “something" in point having been an odd twist for a new story. But the oddest twist to this particular Haroun-al-Raschid anecdote-and a typical O. Henry twist it is-is the fact that the idea O. Henry suddenly got for his story had absolutely nothing to do with the Bowery, with tramps, with two-cent coffee, or anything even remotely related thereto. "Well, then," remarked a friend to whom he had narrated the incident, "what good did the Bowery sojourn do you? You didn't get your three-hundred-dollar idea from a tramp after all, did you?" "Indeed, I did," replied O. Henry. "That is, in a way. The tramp didn't give me the idea, to be sure, but he did not drive it out of my head-which is just as important. If I had not gone down on the Bowery and had chosen an uptown friend for a companion instead of that tramp, my more cultured companion would not have allowed me a moment's conversational respite in which my mind could have worked, and, as a consequence, the idea would never have come to me. So, you see, the Bowery 'hobo' served a lot of good, after all." Strolling through Madison Square one night after the theatre, O. Henry came upon a young girl crying as if her heart were surely cracking, if not already broken. The man with Henry, his pity and sympathy aroused, walked over to the girl, touched her on the shoulder, and inquired into the cause of her grief. It developed that the girl had come to the city from a town in central New Jersey, had lost her way, and was without money, friends, or a place to sleep. Deeply touched, the man with the short-story writer gave the girl a couple of dollars, put her in charge of a policeman, whose latent sympathy he managed to arouse with a one-dollar bill, and, satisfied with his act of charity, locked arms with Henry and continued on through the dark square toward Twenty-third Street. "Why didn't you speak to her?" he asked Henry. "I'll bet there was a corking story in that girl that you could have dragged out." O. Henry smiled. "Old man," he said, "there never is a story where there seems to be one. one rule I always work on-it saves time, and let me see-two plus one-yes, three dollars!" That's O. Henry's metropolitan sales- and shop-girl types are known to his readers. "Do you ever go into the department stores to study them?" some one once asked the writer. "Indeed, not," answered the latter. "It is not the sales-girl in the department store who is worth studying, it is the sales-girl out of it. You can't get romance over a counter." With two friends O. Henry was walking down Broadway one evening in December-Broadway, the sack of New York "life," the big paper Bagdad out of which O. Henry drew many of his characters. Near Herald Square the men were approached by a rather well-dressed young man who, in a calm, gentle voice, told his "hard luck story" and begged for the "loan" of a quarter. One of the men handed over the twenty-five cents to the stranger and the latter disappeared quickly 'round the corner into Thirty-sixth Street. "Seemed like an honest, worthy chap," remarked the man who had parted with the.quarter. "Yes," added O. Henry, quietly, "he seemed like an honest, worthy chap to me, too-last night.” While walking down Broadway on another occasion, O. Henry accidentally bumped against a man who was not looking in the direction he was walking. "I beg your pardon," said Henry, "but really you ought to look where you are going." "If I did in this town, I probably wouldn't go," replied the man with a sarcastic smile. "Ah," said O. Henry, quickly, "and how are all the folks in Chicago?" When O. Henry collaborated with F. P. Adams in writing the libretto for the musical comedy, "Lo," a friend said to him: "Adams says he got the idea for his share of the play from a check for advance royalties. Where did you get the idea for your share?" "From the hope for a check for advance royalties," he answered. While "Harouning" along the river front one night, O. Henry happened upon a couple of sailors, one of whom was much the worse for liquor. "I see your friend is intoxicated," he remarked to the sober sailor. "You don't say!" exclaimed the latter in mock astonishment. And the short-story king appreciated the answer at his expense as much as did those to whom he subsequently repeated it. O. Henry never missed a favorable opportunity to have a chat with an amiable policeman. "Policeman know so many odd things and so few necessary ones," he would remark. While talking with one of the blue-coats in Hell's Kitchen one night, years ago, Henry said that they were suddenly startled-at least, that he was-by two loud revolver shots. "Some one's been killed!" he exclaimed. "No, don't worry," returned the "cop," coolly, "only injured. It takes at least three bullets to kill any one in this part of town." O. HENRY-APOTHECARY 1 By Christopher Morley WHERE once he measured camphor, glycerine, That druggists keep in rows of stoppered jars— Dispenses sadness tinctured with a smile O brave apothecary! You who knew 1 From a volum of Mr. Morley's poems published by the George H. Doran Company. |