taken much time and labor to construct. While, of course, I do not know the fact, I strongly suspect that the doctor's mother inspired these outrages.

Scientists distinguish three kinds of inheritance. In the case of "blended" inheritance, the child, like a folk-song, bears the marks of composite authorship; in "prepotent" inheritance, one parent or remoter ancestor is supposed to be most effective in stamping the offspring; and in "exclusive" inheritance, the character of the descendant is definitely that of one ancestor. Though the classification rests on no wellestablished basis and illustrates the use of three obedient adjectives rather than the operation of ascertained laws, it is at least convenient and may serve pro tem till a wiser survey replaces it. It is easy to see that O. Henry was the beneficiary not of an exclusive but of a blended inheritance. "This is a country," he reminds us, "of mix-ups." But the mother strain, if not prepotent in the sense of science, seems to me to have outweighed that of any other relative of whom we have record.

CHAPTER

FOUR

BIRTHPLACE AND EARLY YEARS

O. HENRY once wrote from New York:

I was born and raised in "No'th Ca'llina" and at eighteen went to Texas and ran wild on the prairies. Wild yet, but not so wild. Can't get to loving New Yorkers. Live all alone in a great big two rooms on quiet old Irving Place three doors from Wash. Irving's old home. Kind of lonesome. Was thinking lately (since the April moon commenced to shine) how I'd like to be down South, where I could happen over to Miss Ethel's or Miss Sallie's and sit down on the porch-not on a chair on the edge of the porch, and lay my straw hat on the steps and lay my head back against the honeysuckle on the post-and just talk. And Miss Ethel would go in directly (they say "presently" up here) and bring out the guitar. She would complain that the E string was broken, but no one would believe her; and pretty soon all of us would be singing the "Swanee River" and "In the Evening by the Moonlight" and-oh, gol darn it, what's the use of wishing?

These words, in which O. Henry almost succeeds in expressing the inexpressible, are cited by Miss Marguerite Campion in Harper's Weekly* as an example of "charm." "For charm," she says, "is three parts softness. Did not O. Henry, almost more than any other American writer, possess it, and was he not, until the day of his death, the soft-hearted advocate

*For November 27, 1915.

of humanity, the friend-of-all-the-world, after the only original model of Kim, the vagabond? Charm flowed from him through his peculiarly personal pen into all that he wrote."

The passage is reproduced here not to illustrate charm-though every word is instinct with it—but as an example of O. Henry's ingrained affection for the place of his birth. A boy's life in a small Southern town immediately after the war, one phase of that life at least, was never better portrayed than these lines portray it, and whatever facts or events may be added in this chapter may best be interpreted against the background of the April moon, the porch, the honeysuckle, and the guitar with the broken E string. A few years later O. Henry said, of the novel that he hoped to write: "The 'hero' of the story will be a man born and raised' in a somnolent little Southern town. His education is about a common school one, but he learns afterward from reading and life."

It is of this little town and of the formative influences that passed from it into O. Henry that we purpose in this chapter to write. Had William Sydney Porter not been reared in "a somnolent little Southern town" he would hardly have developed into the O. Henry that we know to-day. He was all his life a dreamer, and if the "City of Flowers" had already become the "Gate City" during his boyhood, if the wooded slopes

had already been covered with the roaring cotton mills, the dreamer whose dreams were to become literature would hardly have found in the place of his birth either the time or the clime in which to develop his dream faculties. The somnolent little Southern town, moreover, which he would have sketched if he had lived to write his literary autobiography, deserves more than a mere mention. Not only was it the place that nurtured him and his forebears, that released his constructive powers, that held a place in his dreams to the end; it had also an individuality of its own and a history not without dignity and distinction.

Greensboro took its name from General Nathanael Greene, of Rhode Island. Five miles northwest of the town, on March 15, 1781, the great Rhode Islander fought his greatest battle, that of Guilford Court House. The fact that the battle was not incontestably a victory for either Greene or Cornwallis has, by multiplying discussion, been an advantage in keeping alive the memory of the conflict and of the issues involved. The boys and girls of Greensboro know more about the battle and about the traditions that still hover around the field than they would have known if either Greene or Cornwallis had been decisively and undebatably defeated. Mark Twain says that every American is born with the date 1492 engraved on his brain. The children of Guilford County are born

with March 15, 1781, similarly impressed. Since the publication, however, of Schenck's "Memorial Volume of the Guilford Battle Ground Company," in 1893, historians have begun to recognize that in any fair perspective the battle of Guilford Court House must rank as a turning point in the Revolutionary War. Ultimate victory was assured and would have come to the patriot arms without the contribution of this battle, but it would not have come at Yorktown seven months and four days later. A participant in the battle wrote immediately afterward:*

The enemy were so beaten that we should have disputed the victory could we have saved our artillery, but the General thought that it was a necessary sacrifice. The spirits of the soldiers would have been affected if the cannon had been sent off the field, and in this woody country cannon cannot always be sent off at a critical moment.

The General, by his abilities and good conduct and by his activity and bravery in the field, has gained the confidence and respect of the army and the country to an amazing degree. You would, from the countenances of our men, believe they had been decidedly victorious. They are in the highest spirits, and appear most ardently to wish to engage the enemy again. The enemy are much embarrassed by their wounded. When we consider the nakedness of our troops and of course their want of discipline, their numbers, and the loose, irregular manner in which we came into the field, I think we have done wonders. I rejoice at our success, and were our exertions and sacrifices published to the world as some commanding officers would have published them, we should have received more applause than our modesty claims. *The letter was published in the New Jersey State Gazette of April 11, 1781.