and in the shadowed banana groves and in the mangrove swamps, where the great blue crabs were beginning to crawl to land for their nightly ramble. And it died, at last, upon the highest peaks. Then the brief twilight, ephemeral as the flight of a moth, came and went; the Southern Cross peeped with its topmost eye above a row of palms, and the fire-flies heralded with their torches the approach of soft-footed night.

There is the trick of the diverted and diverting quotation:

"Then," says I, "we'll export canned music to the Latins; but I'm mindful of Mr. Julius Cæsar's account of 'em where he says: 'Omnis Gallia in tres partes divisa est'; which is the same as to say, 'We will need all of our gall in devising means to tree them parties.''

There is the pitting of city against city:

"Yes, I judge that town was considerably on the quiet. I judge that after Gabriel quits blowing his horn, and the car starts, with Philadelphia swinging to the last strap, and Pine Gully, Arkansas, hanging onto the rear step, this town of Solitas will wake up and ask if anybody spoke.

There is the art of hitting the target by seeming to aim above it, a sort of calculated exaggeration:

"Twice before," says the consul, "I have cabled our government for a couple of gunboats to protect American citizens. The first time the Department sent me a pair of gum boots. The other time was when a man named Pease was going to be executed here. They referred that appeal to the Secretary of Agriculture."

And there is the love of street scenes in New York which was to grow with him to his last moment:

I get homesick sometimes, and I'd swap the entire perquisites of office for just one hour to have a stein and a caviare sandwich somewhere on Thirty-fourth Street, and stand and watch the street cars go by, and smell the peanut roaster at old Giuseppe's fruit stand.

But with all these divertissements and many more, "Cabbages and Kings" was, comparatively, a failure. It is not equal to the sum total of its seventeen constituent parts. It has unity, but it is the unity of a sustained cleverness carried to an extreme. Suspense is preserved but interest is sacrificed. Chapters XII and XIII, called respectively "Shoes" and "Ships," will illustrate. These two stories had not been previously published. They were fashioned and put in after the author had decided to amplify his title by giving prominence to the stanza

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things;

Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax,
And cabbages and kings.”

Sealing-wax had been already incidentally mentioned in "The Lotus and the Bottle" which was published in January, 1902, and which forms the second chapter of

"Cabbages and Kings." But "shoes and ships" must be accounted for, though the natives of Coralio went barefooted. So five hundred pounds of stiff, dry cockleburrs are shipped from Alabama and sprinkled by night along the narrow sidewalks of Coralio. Shoes become a necessity and ships bring them, along with more cockleburrs. But, in the meanwhile, the two central characters of the novel, Goodwin and his wife, are dropped from the story. They must wait till the exactions of line three of our prefatory stanza are met and resolved. But, more disconcerting still, Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin are presented as charlatans and thieves. It is not till the seventeenth chapter is reached that we find we have been deceived. Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin are neither charlatans nor thieves. They are honest, clever, and likable. We must reread the whole story to reinstate them. Clever? Too clever.

By the time "Cabbages and Kings" was published, New York life had gripped O. Henry and he had entered upon his most prolific period. During 1904, if we omit the stories published in "Cabbages and Kings" and count only those that have since appeared in book form, the total is sixty-five; the total for 1905 is fifty. No other years of his life approximated such an output. Of these hundred and fifteen stories all but twenty-one appeared in the columns of the New York World and all but sixteen deal directly or indirectly with New York

City. O. Henry's contract with the World called for a story a week, the payment for each being one hundred dollars. They would bring now at the lowest estimate, writes a New York editor, between a thousand and fifteen hundred dollars each. When we consider not only the number of these stories but their differences of mood and manner, their equal mastery of humour and pathos, their sheer originality of conception and execution, and their steadily increasing appeal in book form to every grade of reader, it becomes evident that a new chapter has been added to the annals of narrative genius in this country. The short story in 1904 and 1905 developed a new flexibility, established new means of communication between literature and life, and, as a mirror of certain aspects of American society, attained a fidelity and an adequacy never before achieved.

In 1906, O. Henry's second book appeared, "The Four Million." It stamped the author as the foremost American short story writer of his time and furnished also in its famous prefatory note a clue to his activities and interests during 1904-1905:

Not very long ago some one invented the assertion that there were only "Four Hundred" people in New York City who were really worth noticing. But a wiser man has arisen-the census taker and his larger estimate of human interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little stories of the "Four Million."

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