impression of ideals lost in a depressing aura of potato salad and fish.

Pittsburg impressed him as the play of "Othello" performed in the Russian language in a railroad station by Dockstader's minstrels. A royal and generous lady this Pittsburg, though— homely, hearty, with flushed face, washing the dishes in a silk dress and white kid slippers, and bidding Raggles sit before the roaring fireplace and drink champagne with his pigs' feet and fried potatoes.

New Orleans had simply gazed down upon him from a balcony. He could see her pensive, starry eyes and catch the flutter of her fan, and that was all. Only once he came face to face with her. It was at dawn, when she was flushing the red bricks of the banquette with a pail of water. She laughed and hummed a chansonette and filled Raggles's shoes with ice-cold water. Allons!

Boston construed herself to the poetic Raggles in an erratic and singular way. It seemed to him that he had drunk cold tea and that the city was a white, cold cloth that had been bound tightly around his brow to spur him to some unknown but tremendous mental effort. And, after all, he came to shovel snow for a livelihood; and the cloth, becoming wet, tightened its knots and could not be removed.

In "A Municipal Report," O. Henry answers the challenge of Frank Norris who had said:

Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee! There are just three big cities in the United States that are "story cities"-New York, of course, New Orleans, and. best of the lot, San Francisco.

O. Henry replies:

But, dear cousins all (from Adam and Eve descended), it is a rash one who will lay his finger on the map and say: "In this town there can be no romance-what could happen here?

Yes,

it is a bold and a rash deed to challenge in one sentence history, romance, and Rand and McNally.

Then follows a story of Nashville, Tennessee, which O. Henry had visited when his daughter was attending Belmont College. "For me," writes Mr. Albert Frederick Wilson, of New York University, "it is the finest example of the short story ever produced in America." "If the reader is not satisfied," says Mr. Stephen Leacock, after attempting to summarize "Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet" and "The Furnished Room," "let him procure for himself the story called 'A Municipal Report' in the volume 'Strictly Business.' After he has read it he will either pronounce O. Henry one of the greatest masters of modern fiction or else, well, or else he is a jackass. Let us put it that way."

The story ends on the note with which it began: "I wonder what's doing in Buffalo?" It is O. Henry's most powerful presentation of his conviction that to the seeing eye all cities are story cities. It is the appeal of an interpretative genius from statistics to life, from the husks of a municipality as gathered by Rand and McNally to the heart of a city as seen by an artist.

But it happened to O. Henry as it had happened to Raggles:

One day he came and laid siege to the heart of the great city of Manhattan. She was the greatest of all; and he wanted to learn

her note in the scale; to taste and appraise and classify and solve and label her and arrange her with the other cities that had given him up the secret of their individuality.

In "The Voice of the City," O. Henry approaches New York as did Raggles via other cities:

"I must go and find out," I said, "what is the Voice of this city. Other cities have voices. It is an assignment. I must have it. New York," I continued, in a rising tone, "had better not hand me a cigar and say: 'Old man, I can't talk for publication.' No other city acts in that way. Chicago says, unhesitatingly, 'I will'; Philadelphia says, 'I should'; New Orleans says, 'I used to'; Louisville says, 'Don't care if I do'; St. Louis says, 'Excuse me'; Pittsburg says, 'Smoke up.' Now, New York-"

O. Henry's synonyms for New York and his photographic descriptions of special streets and squares have often been commented upon. Mr. Arthur Bartlett Maurice says again:*

In the course of this rambling pilgrimage, the name of Sydney Porter has appeared, and will very likely continue to appear, two or three times to one mention of any other one writer. This is due not only to the high esteem in which the pilgrim holds the work of that singular and gifted man, but also to the fact that the dozen volumes containing the work of O. Henry constitute a kind of convenient bank upon which the pilgrim is able to draw in the many moments of emergency. Perfect frankness is a weapon with which to forestall criticism, and so, to express the matter

"The New York of the Novelists: The Heart of O. Henry Land" (the Bookman, New York, December, 1915).