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ments later the beggar looked at the coin under a street lamp, and, being even such a beggar as O. Henry loved to write about, he came running back with the words, “Say, you made a mistake, this is a twenty-dollar gold piece.” “I know it is,” said O. Henry, “but it’s all I have.”

The story may not be true. But at least it ought to be.

From New Orleans O. Henry moved to New York and became, for the rest of his life, a unit among the “four million” dwellers in flats and apartment houses and sand-stone palaces who live within the roar of the elevated railway, and from whom the pale light of the moon and the small effects of the planetary system are overwhelmed in the glare of the Great White Way. Here O. Henry’s finest work was done—inimitable, unsurpassable stories that make up the volumes entitled “The Four Million,” “The Trimmed Lamp,” and “The Voice of the City.”

Marvellous indeed they are. Written offhand with the bold carelessness of the pen that only genius dare use, but revealing behind them such a glow of the imagination and such a depth of understanding of the human heart as only genius can make manifest.

What O. Henry did for Central America he does again for New York. It is transformed by the magic of his imagination. He waves a wand over it and it becomes a city of mystery and romance. It is no longer the roaring, surging metropolis that we thought we knew, with its clattering elevated, its