poverty of resources. In the presence of such methods he seemed to me uneasy and bored rather than indignant or shocked. No one at least who knew him in the old days will wonder at the surprise with which in later years he resented the constant comparison of his work with that of De Maupassant, though toward the last he kept a copy of De Maupassant always at hand. No two writers ever lived more diametrically opposed than O. Henry and De Maupassant except in technique. "I have been called," he said, "the American De Maupassant. Well, I never wrote a filthy word in my life, and I don't like to be compared to a filthy writer." Like Edgar Allan Poe, with whom he had little else in common, O. Henry was honoured during his whole life with the understanding friendship of a few noble-spirited women who in the early days, as in the later, helped, I think, to keep his compass true.

After Miss Lina's school the drug store was to O. Henry a sort of advanced course in human nature and in the cartoonist's art. George Eliot tells in "Romola" of the part played in medieval Florence by the barber shop. A somewhat analogous part was played in Greensboro forty years ago by Clark Porter's drug store. It was the rendezvous of all classes, though the rear room was reserved for the more elect. The two rooms constituted in fact the social, political, and anecdotal clearing house of the town. The patronage of the

grocery stores and drygoods stores was controlled in part by denominational lines, but everybody patronized the drug store. It was also a sort of physical confessional. The man who would expend only a few words in purchasing a ham or a hat would talk half an hour of his aches and ills or those of his family before buying twenty-five cents' worth of pills or a ten-cent bottle of liniment. When the ham or the hat was paid for and taken away there was usually an end of it. Not so with the pills or the liniment. The patient usually came back to continue his personal or family history and to add a sketch of the character and conduct of the pills or liniment. All this was grist to O. Henry's mill.

No one, I think, without a training similar to O. Henry's, would be likely to write such a story as "Makes the Whole World Kin." It is not so much the knowledge of drugs displayed as the conversational atmosphere of the drug store in a small Southern town that gives the local flavour. A burglar, you remember, has entered a house at night. "Hold up both your hands," he said. "Can't raise the other one," was the reply. "What's the matter with it?" "Rheumatism in the shoulder." "Inflammatory?" asked the burglar. "Was. The inflammation has gone down." 'Scuse me," said the burglar, “but it just socked me one, too." "How long have you had it?”

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inquired the citizen. "Four years." "Ever try rattlesnake oil?" asked the citizen. "Gallons. If all the snakes I've used the oil of was strung out in a row they'd reach eight times as far as Saturn, and the rattles could be heard at Valparaiso, Indiana, and back." In the end the burglar helps the citizen to dress and they go out together, the burglar standing treat.

The drawings that O. Henry used to make of the characters that frequented the drug store were not caricatures. There was usually, it is true, an overemphasis put upon some one trait, but this trait was the central trait, the over-emphasis serving only to interpret and reveal the character as a whole. Examining these sketches anew, when the characters themselves are thirty odd years older than they were then, one is struck with the resemblance still existing. In fact, O. Henry's sketches reproduce the characters as they are to-day more faithfully than do the photographs taken at the same time. The photographs have been outgrown, but not the sketches; for the sketches caught the central and permanent, while the photographs made no distinction. In O. Henry's story called "A Madison Square Arabian Night," an artist, picked at random from the "free-bed line,” is made to say:

Whenever I finished a picture people would come to see it, and whisper and look queerly at one another. I soon found out

what the trouble was. I had a knack of bringing out in the face of a portrait the hidden character of the original. I don't know how I did it-I painted what I saw.

But O. Henry's distinctive skill, the skill of the story teller that was to be, is seen to better advantage in his pictures of groups than in his pictures of individuals. Into the group pictures, which he soon came to prefer to any others, he put more of himself and more of the life of the community. They gave room for a sort of collective interpretation which seems to me very closely related to the plots of his short stories. There is the same selection of a central theme, the same saturation with a controlling idea, the same careful choice of contributory details, the same rejection of non-essentials, and the same ability to fuse both theme and details into a single totality of effect. "He could pack more of the social history of this city into a small picture,' said a citizen of Austin, Texas, "than I thought possible. Those of us who were on the inside could read the story as if printed. Let me show you," and he entered into an affectionate rhapsody over a little pen and ink sketch which he still carried in his inside coat pocket.

An illustration is found in a sketch of the interior of Clark Porter's drug store. The date is 1879. Every character is drawn to the life, but what gives unity to the whole is the grouping and the implied comment, rather than criticism, that the grouping suggests.