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).

very bluntly, whenever the writer finds himself in a street or a neighbourhood about which there is little apparent to say, he turns to "The Four Million," or "The Trimmed Lamp," or "The Voice of the City," or "Whirligigs," or "Strictly Business," and in one of these books is able to find the rescuing allusion or descriptive line.

But O. Henry's study went far deeper than "the rescuing allusion or descriptive line." "I would like to live a lifetime," he once said to Mr. Gilman Hall, "on each street in New York. Every house has a drama in it." Indeed the most distinctive and certainly the most thought-provoking aspect of O. Henry's portrayal of New York is not to be found in his descriptions. It lies rather in his attempt to isolate and vivify the character, the service, the function of the city. Streets, parks, squares, buildings, even the multitudinous life itself that flowed ceaselessly before him were to him but the outward and visible signs of a life, a spirit, that informed all and energized all.

But what was it? O. Henry would seem to say, "It is not a single element, like oxygen or hydrogen or gold. It is a combination, a formula, compounded of several elements." In "Squaring the Circle" we learn that a Kentucky feud of forty years' standing had left but a single member of each family, Cal Harkness and Sam Folwell. Cal has moved to New York. Sam, armed to the teeth, follows him. It was Sam's first