for suffering was infinite. He used to say 'I know how it is.' That was his gift. He had a genius for friendship."

The first step in putting the past irrevocably behind him was to write under an assumed name. The penname of O. Henry may have been thought of while he was in New Orleans; it may have been suggested by the names found in a New Orleans daily, the TimesDemocrat or the Picayune. O. Henry, I believe, is reported to have said as much. But the evidence is that he did not adopt and use the name until he found himself in prison. When the S. S. McClure Company wrote to him about "The Miracle of Lava Cañon" (see page 124), he had been out of New Orleans nearly a year and was never to see the city again, but he was addressed as W. S. Porter and the story was published as W. S. Porter's. On April 25, 1898, the day on which he arrived in Columbus, the S. S. McClure Company wrote to him in Austin, addressing him as Sydney Porter. It was his first change of signature and was adopted in the month between his conviction and his commitment. It was also the name to be engraved upon his visiting cards in New York. But after reaching Columbus, not before, he took the pen-name O. Henry and kept it to the end.*

*So far as I can discover, only three stories were signed Sydney Porter and these are not reproduced in O. Henry's collected works. They were "The Cactus" and "Round the Circle," both published in Everybody's for October, 1902, and "Hearts and Hands," published in Everybody's for December of the same year. Other names occasionally signed were Olivier Henry, S. H. Peters, James L. Bliss (once), T. B. Dowd, and Howard Clark.

One of the most interesting odds and ends found among O. Henry's belongings is a small notebook used by him in prison. In it he jotted down the names of his stories and the magazines to which he sent them. It is not complete, the first date being October 1, 1900. It contains, therefore, no mention of "Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking," which appeared in McClure's Magazine for December, 1899, or of "Georgia's Ruling," to which he alludes in the letter to Mrs. Roach (see page 162). Of the stories now grouped into books, these two were the first written. The stories listed in the prison notebook and now republished in book form are, in chronological order, "An Afternoon Miracle, "* "Money Maze," "No Story," "A Fog in Santone," "A Blackjack Bargainer," "The Enchanted Kiss," "Hygeia at the Solito," "Rouge et Noir," "The Duplicity of Hargraves," and "The Marionettes."

These twelve stories, three of which were picked as among O. Henry's best in the plebiscite held by the Bookman, June, 1914, show a range of imagination, a directness of style, and a deftness of craftsmanship to which little was to be added. In the silent watches of the night, when the only sound heard was "the occasional sigh or groan from the beds which were stretched before him in the hospital ward or the tramp of the passing guard," O. Henry had come into his own. He

*This is a re-shaping of his first story, "The Miracle of Lava Cañon." See page 124.

had passed from journalism to literature. He had turned a stumbling-block into a stepping-stone. And his mother's graduating essay, "The Influence of Misfortune on the Gifted," written a half century before, had received its strangest and most striking fulfilment.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

FINDING HIMSELF IN NEW YORK

ON JULY 24, 1901, the day of his liberation, O. Henry went to Pittsburg where his daughter and her grandparents were then living. Mr. and Mrs. Roach had moved from Austin immediately after the trial. Mr. Roach was now the manager of the Iron Front Hotel in Pittsburg, and here O. Henry improvised an office in which he secluded himself and wrote almost continuously. The stories that had issued from the prison in Columbus had gone first to New Orleans and had been re-mailed there. Now the stories were sent direct from Pittsburg.

The call or rather invitation to New York came in the spring of 1902. Mr. Gilman Hall, associate editor of Everybody's Magazine but at that time associate editor of Ainslee's, had written an appreciative letter to O. Henry before the prison doors had opened. The letter was directed, of course, to New Orleans where the stories were thought to originate. "The stories that he submitted to Duffy and myself," said Mr. Hall, "both from New Orleans and Pittsburg were so excellent that at least the first seven out of eight were imme

diately accepted. For these first stories we gave him probably seventy-five dollars each." O. Henry did not go to New York under contract. He went because Mr. Hall, quick to discover merit and unhappy till he has extended a helping hand, urged him to come.

New York needed him and he needed New York. How great the need was on both sides it is not likely that Mr. Hall or Mr. Duffy or O. Henry himself knew. During the eight years of his stay, however, O. Henry was to get closer to the inner life of the great city and to succeed better in giving it a voice than any one else had done. To O. Henry this last quest of "What's around the corner," confined now to a city that was a world within itself, was to be his supreme inspiration. Very soon he found that he could not work outside of New York. "I could look at these mountains a hundred years," he said to Mrs. Porter in Asheville, "and never get an idea, but just one block downtown and I catch a sentence, see something in a face-and I've got my story." If ever in American literature the place and the man met, they met when O. Henry strolled for the first time along the streets of New York.

"Of the writing men and women of the newer generation," says Mr. Arthur Bartlett Maurice,* "the men and women whose trails are the subject of these papers, there are many who have staked claims to certain New

*See "The New York of the Novelists" (the Bookman, New York, October, 1915).