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say here, to speak in a kind of country style of English, as though the English language were an instrument he handled with hesitant unfamiliarity. Thus it happened that a woman who had written to him about his stories and asked if her “lady friend” and she might meet him, informed him afterward: “You mortified me nearly to death, you talked so ungrammatical!”

We never knew just where he stopped the first night in New York, beyond his statement that it was at a hotel not far from the ferry in a neighbourhood of so much noise that he had not been able to sleep. I suppose we were voluminous with suggestions as to where he might care to live, because we felt we had some knowledge of the subject of board and lodging, and because he was the kind of man you’d give your best hat to on short acquaintance, if he needed a hat—but also he was the kind of man who would get a hat for himself. Within about twenty-four hours he called at the office again to say that he had taken a large room in a French table d’hôte hotel in Twenty-fourth Street, between Broadway and Sixth Avenue. Moreover, he brought us a story. In those days he was very prolific. He wrote not only stories, but occasional skits and light verse. In a single number of Ainslee’s, as I remember, we had three short stories of his, one of which was signed “O. Henry” and the other two with pseudonyms. Of the latter, While the Auto Waits,^[1] was picked out