home, with its three lofty stories and two-storied porches, its wide-spreading lawn and massive oaks, contests with Monticello the primacy among Virginia's ancestral seats. Here was born Anne Hill Carter, the wife of Light Horse Harry Lee and the mother of Robert E. Lee. As far back as 1622, in the history of the Indian massacre of that year, the Plantation of West Shirley in Virginia is mentioned as one of the "five or six well-fortified places" into which the survivors gathered for defense. It was from the Shirleys of Wiston, who gave the name to the plantation and later to the home, that the Shirley family of Princess Anne County always traced their descent. Though I have been unable to find an Abia Shirley antedating O. Henry's grandmother, William Swaim, in a letter lying before me, dated Greensboro, N. C., May 22, 1830, speaks of Nancy Shirley, his wife's sister, "who had intermarried with Thomas Bray." It is at least a noteworthy coincidence that a sixteenth-century Beatrix Shirley of Wiston married "Sir Edward Bray, the elder, of Vachery, Surrey County, Knight.”*

But whether "the original Abia Shirley" was fact or fancy, it is certain that the Abia Shirley, who became O. Henry's grandmother, lived a gracious and exemplary life in Greensboro and bequeathed a memory still cherished by the few friends who survive her.

"Stemmata Shirleiana."

The following obituary notice, signed "A Friend," appeared in the Patriot of January, 1858:

DIED. In this place on Monday morning, January 18th, Mrs. Abia Swaim, wife of Lyndon Swaim, in the 50th year of her age. For nearly two years Mrs. Swaim had been confined to her room, and most of that time to her bed, by consumption-constantly in pain, which she patiently endured with great Christian fortitude. She leaves an affectionate husband and a devoted daughter to mourn their loss. In her death the "poor and the needy" have been deprived of an invaluable friend; for no one in this community was more ready to contribute to the relief of poverty and hunger than the subject of this notice. She was always ready to watch around the sick bed of her friends, and all who knew her were her friends; I believe she had no enemies.

Mrs. Swaim was a native of Eastern Virginia-her maiden name being Shirly. On arriving to womanhood, she removed to this place with her sister, the late Mrs. Carbry, and was afterward united in marriage with William Swaim. He dying, she remained a widow several years, when she was married to Lyndon Swaim.

She embraced religion in her youth, and for a quarter of a century lived an exemplary and acceptable member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, exhibiting on all occasions a strong and lively faith in the efficacy of the blood of Christ; and while her friends drop many sympathizing tears with her bereaved family, they can in their sorrow all rejoice in full assurance that her never-dying spirit is now united with that of a sweet infant daughter who preceded her to heaven; and that at the great resurrection morn, her body will be raised to life everlasting. May we all strive to imitate her many virtues, that when the summons of death comes, we may be able to die as she died, at peace with God and man, and gently close our eyes in sleep.

The "devoted daughter" was Mary Jane Virginia Swaim, O. Henry's mother. She was twenty-five years

old at the time of her mother's death and married Dr. Algernon Sidney Porter three months later. Only seven years had passed when the Patriot bore the following announcement:

DIED

In Greensboro, N. C., September 26, 1865, Mrs. Mary V. Porter, wife of Dr. A. S. Porter, and only child of the late William Swaim. Mrs. Porter leaves a devoted husband and three small children, together with numerous friends to mourn her early death. She gave, in her last moments, most satisfactory evidence that she had made her peace with God, and her friends can entertain no doubt of her happiness in the spirit land. She was aged about thirty years; was a graduate of Greensboro Female College; and possessed mental faculties of high order, finely developed by careful training. Her death is a great social loss to our community; but especially to her affectionate husband and three little children. Her disease was consumption.

Whether O. Henry remembered his mother or not it would be impossible to say. Certain it is that he cherished the thought of her with a devotion and pride and sense of temperamental indebtedness that he felt for no one else, nor for all his other relatives put together. Whatever vein of quiet humour marked his allusions to the other members of his family or to his family history, his mother's name was held apart. She was to him "a thing ensky'd and sainted." There was always an aureole about her. The poems that she wrote and the pictures that she painted-or rather the knowledge that she had written poems and painted