rageously as did John Phoenix or Mark Twain. No one, indeed, has ever pressed this device to deeper abysses of absurdity. After a political gathering many cigar-stubs undoubtedly may be found scattered in the vicinity, but when O. Henry tells the story the cigar-stubs are knee-deep for a quarter of a mile about. A man has chills and fever: "He had n't smiled in eight years. His face was three feet long, and it never moved except to take in quinine." A man with the rheumatism, asked if he had ever rubbed the affected part with rattlesnake-oil, replies: "If all the snakes I have used the oil of was strung out in a row they would reach eight times as far as Saturn and the rattles could be heard at Valparaiso, Indiana, and back. And of a casual doctor in one of his tales:

If Doc Millikin had your case, he made the terrors of death seem like an invitation to a donkey party. He had the bedside manners of a Piute medicine-man and the soothing presence of a dray loaded with iron bridge-girders. He was built like a shad, and his eyebrows was black, and his white whiskers trickled down from his chin like milk coming out of a sprinkling pot. He had a nigger boy along carrying an old tomato-can full of calomel, and a saw.

In the originality of his exaggerations no humorist has ever excelled him. His comparisons are

unique. There is not a hackneyed expression in all his volumes. One might quote indefinitely:

She had hair the color of the back of a twentydollar gold certificate, blue eyes, and a system of beauty that would make the girl on the cover of a July magazine look like the cook on a Monongahela coal barge.

He was the red-hottest Southerner that ever smelled mint. He made Stonewall Jackson and R. E. Lee look like abolitionists.

Her eyes were as big and startling as bunions.

He had a voice like a coyote with bronchitis.

Ten minutes afterward the Captain arrived at the rendezvous, windy and thunderous as a dog-day in Kansas.

He loosened up like a Marcel wave in the surf of Coney.

Fate tosses you about like cork crumbs in wine opened by an unfeed waiter.

The mark of O. Henry is upon such work as peculiarly and exclusively as is the mark of Artemus Ward on the speeches of the genial showman. He has, too, the American fondness for aphorism, and at times is as pregnant with quaint philosophy as Josh Billings. It is an O. Henry philosophy, however.

A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito: it bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience.

A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.

What a woman wants is what you're out of.

He

The lover smiles when he thinks he has won; the woman who loves ceases to smile with victory. ends a battle; she begins hers.

There ain't a sorrow in the chorus that a lobster cannot heal.

Words are as wax in his hands:

Annette Fletcherized large numbers of romantic novels.

The stage curtain, blushing pink at the name "Asbestos" inscribed upon it, came down with a slow midsummer movement. The audience trickled leisurely down the elevator and stairs.

We laugh often at the very freshness and newness of his phrases. He hits at times the nail on the head precisely. One feels the glow that only the perfect can give when one comes upon felicities like these:

She was as tidy as a cherry blossom.

At length he reached 'the flimsy, fluttering little soul of the shop-girl. Tremblingly, awfully her moth

wings closed and she seemed about to settle on the flower of love.

Her uplifted happy eyes, as bright and clear as the water in trout pools.

Something mushy and heavily soft like raised dough leaned against Jim's leg and chewed his trousers with a yeasty growl. [This of a pug dog.]

No device for raising a laugh but he has used it to the utmost, and for the most part with a zest that is primitive in its emphasis. Open him anywhere, at random: outrageous non sequiturs, most hideous coinages, malaproprieties, deliberate misquotations, slang exaggerated to the limit of endurance-nowhere outside of the comic supplement can you find a wilder hodgepodge of incongruity. Not even John Phoenix has made such startling use of irreverence. To him nothing is sacred: "Be considerable moanin' of the bars when I put out to sea," soliloquizes the Toledo man while he is dying of consumption; "I've patronized 'em pretty freely." He delights in biblical exegesis. This is his version of the Samson story:

She gave her old man a hair cut, and everybody knows what a man's head looks like after a woman cuts his hair. And then when the Pharisees came round to guy him, he was so ashamed he went to work and kicked the whole house down on top of the whole outfit.

But the most prominent humorous mannerism of O. Henry, the one that runs like a falsetto motif through all his work, is a variety of euphemism, the translating of simple words and phrases into resounding and inflated circumlocutions. So completely did this trick take possession of him that one may denominate it a literary cliché, the trademark of O. Henry. All his characters make use of it as a dialect. Sometimes it is even funny. A waiter is not a waiter but "a friendly devil in a cabbage-scented hell"; a tramp becomes a "knight on a restless tour of the cities"; a remark about the weather becomes "a pleasant reference to meteorological conditions." Mr. Brunelli does not fall in love with Katy: "Mr. Brunelli, being impressionable and a Latin, fell to conjugating the verb amare with Katy in the objective case." John Hopkins buys not a cheap cigar but a "bunch of spinach, car-fare grade." A reasonable amount of this, when at its best, is tolerable, perhaps, but O. Henry wears the device threadbare. Constantly he seems straining for bizarre effect, for outrageous circumlocutions, for unheard-of methods of not calling a spade a spade. A plain statement like "the woman looked at him, hoping he would invite her to a champagne supper," becomes with O. Henry "She turned languishing eyes upon him as a hopeful source of lobsters and the delectable, ascend