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artist for that reason. He has none of the conscious stylist’s elaborate little tricks with words, for he is a master of language and not its slave. He is as happily colloquial as Kipling was in his early tales, but his style is as individual, as naturally his own, as a man’s voice may be. He seems to go as he pleases, writing apparently just whatever words happen to be in the ink, yet all the while he is getting hold of his reader’s interest, subtly shaping his narrative with the storyteller’s unerring instinct, generally allowing you no glimpse of its culminating point until you are right on it. “The art of narrative,” said Keogh, in “Cabbages and Kings,” “consists in concealing from your audience everything it wants to know until after you expose your favourite opinions on topics foreign to the subject. A good story is like a bitter pill with the sugar coating inside of it”; and this art O. Henry practises with a skill that is invariably admirable and at times startling. More than once he leads you deftly on till you arrive at what would seem an ingenious ending, then in a sudden paragraph he will give the whole thing a quick turn and land you ina still more ingenious climax that leaves victory in the hands of the character who had seemed to have lost.

“Cabbages and Kings,” a series of stories held together by a central thread of interest, is the nearest O. Henry came to writing a novel. Toward the end of his career his publishers urged him to write one and among his papers after his death was found an unfinished reply to them setting out something of his