fireworks more than an aviateur de chasse. Having carefully mapped the enemy "sausages," he would sally forth in hot pursuit whenever one was signaled at a respectable height. Poor Norman had a terrible time of it! Sometimes the reported "sausages" were not there when he arrived, and sometimes there was a superabundancy of German airplanes on guard.

He stuck to it, however, and finally his appetite for "sausage" was satisfied. He found one just where it ought to be, swooped down upon it, and let off his fireworks with all the gusto of an American boy on the Fourth of July. When he looked again, the balloon had vanished. Prince's performance isn't as easy as it sounds, by the way. If, after the long dive necessary to turn the trick, his engines had failed to retake, he would have fallen into the hands of the Germans.

After dark, when flying is over for the day, we go down to the villa for dinner. Usually we have two or three French officers dining with us besides our own captain and lieutenant, and so the table talk is a mixture of French and English. It's seldom we discuss the war in general. Mostly the conversation revolves about our own sphere, for just as in the navy the sea is the favorite topic, and in the army the trenches, so with us it is aviation. Our knowledge about the military operations is scant. We haven't the remotest idea as to what has taken place on the battlefield, even though we've been flying over it during an attack, until we read the papers-and they don't tell us much.

Frequently pilots from other escadrilles will be our guests in passing through our sector, and through these visitations we keep in touch with the aërial news of the day, and with our friends along the front. Gradually we have come to know a great number of pilotes de chasse. We hear that So and So has been killed, that some one else has brought down a Boche, and that still another is a prisoner.

We don't always talk aviation, however. In the course of dinner almost any subject may be touched upon, and with our cosmopolitan crowd one can readily imagine the scope of the conversation. A Burton Holmes lecture is weak and watery alongside of the travel stories we listen to. Were O. Henry alive, he could find material for a hundred new yarns, and William James numerous pointers for another work on psychology, while De Quincey might multiply his dreams ad infinitum. Doubtless alienists as well as fiction writers would find us worth studying. In France there's a saying that to be an aviator one must be a bit "off."

After dinner the same scene invariably repeats itself, over the coffee in the "next room." At the big table several sportive souls start a poker game, while at a smaller one two sedater spirits wrap themselves in the intricacies of chess. Captain Thenault labors away at the messroom piano, or in lighter mood plays with Fram, his police dog. A phonograph grinds out some thoroughly American ragtime ditty. It is barely nine, however, when the movement in the direction of bed begins.

A few of us remain behind a little while, and the talk becomes more personal and more sincere. Only on such intimate occasions, I think, have I ever heard death discussed. Certainly we are not indifferent to it. Not many nights ago one of the pilots remarked in a tired way:

"Know what I want? Just six months of freedom to go where and do what I want. In that time I'd get everything I wanted out of life, and be perfectly willing to come back and get killed."

Then another, who was about to receive a couple of thousand francs from the American committee that aids us, as a reward for his many citations, chimed in.

"Well, I didn't care much before," he confessed, "but now with this money coming in I don't want to die until I've had the fun of spending it."

And he yawned and went up to bed.

HENRY once New York:

I was born and raised in "No'th Ca'lina" and at eighteen went to Texas and ran wild on the prairies. Wild yet, but not so wild. Can't get to loving New Yorkers. Live all alone in a great big two rooms on quiet old Irving Place three doors from Wash. Irving's old home. Kind of lonesome. Was thinking lately (since the April moon commenced to shine) how I'd like to be down South, where I could happen over to Miss Ethel's or Miss Sallie's and sit down on the porch-not on a chair on the edge of the porch, and lay my straw hat on the steps and lay my head back against the honeysuckle on the post-and just talk. And Miss Ethel would go in directly (they say "presently" up here) and bring out the guitar. She would complain that the E string was broken, but no one would believe her; and pretty soon all of us would be singing the "Swanee River" and "In the Evening by the Moonlight" and -oh, gol darn it, what's the use of wishing.

These words, in which O. Henry almost succeeds in expressing the inexpressible, are an example of his ingrained affection for the place of his birth. A boy's life in a small Southern town immediately after the war, one phase of that life at least, was never better portrayed than these lines portray it, and whatever facts or events are to be added may best be interpreted against the background of the April moon, the porch, the honeysuckle, and the guitar with the broken E string. A few years later O. Henry said, of the novel that he hoped to write: "The 'hero' of the story will be a man born and raised' in a somnolent little Southern town. His educa

Had William Sydney Porter not been reared in "a somnolent little Southern town" he would hardly have developed into the O. Henry that we know to-day. He was all his life a dreamer and if the "City of Flowers" had already become the "Gate City" during his boyhood, if the wooded slopes had already been covered with the roaring cotton mills, the dreamer whose dreams were to become literature would hardly have found in the place of his birth either the time or the clime in which to develop his dream faculties.

William Sydney Porter, better known as O. Henry, was born in Greensboro, Guilford County, North Carolina, September 11, 1862. He died in New York City, June 5, 1910. Before the Porter family Bible was found, his birth year varied from 1867 to 1864, from "about the close of the war" to a question mark. There is no doubt that O. Henry used the author's traditional right to mystify his readers in regard to his age and to the unessential facts of his life. An admirer once wrote to him begging to know by return mail whether he was a man or a woman. the stamped envelope enclosed for reply remains still unused. "If you have any applications from publishers for photos of myself," he wrote to Mr. Witter Bynner, "or 'slush' about the identity of O. Henry, please refuse. Nobody but a concentrated idiot would write over a pen-name and then tack on a lot of twaddle about himself. I say this because I am getting some letters from reviewers and magazines

But

wanting pictures, etc., and I am positively declining in every case."

There has thus grown up a sort of O. Henry myth. "It threatens to attain," said the New York Sun five years after his death, "the proportions of the Stevenson myth, which was so ill-naturedly punctured by Henley. It appears to be inevitably the fate of 'the writers' writer'and O. Henry comes under this heading notwithstanding his work's universal appeal to disintegrate into a sort of grotesque myth after his death. As a matter of fact Sydney Porter was, in a sort of a way, a good deal of a myth before he died. He was so inaccessible that a good many otherwise reasonable people who unsuccessfully sought to penetrate his cordon and to force their way into his cloister drew bountifully upon their imaginations to save their faces and to mask their failure."

But the O. Henry myth could not forever withstand the curiosity and inquiry begotten by the increasing acclaim that the stories were beginning to receive. O. Henry himself must have recognized the futility of attempting a further mystification, for there is evident in his later years a willingness and even a desire to throw off the mask of the assumed name and thus to link his achievement with the name and fortunes of his family. He had sought freedom and self-expression through his writings rather than fame. In fact he shunned publicity with the timidity of a child. "What used to strike me most forcibly in O. Henry," writes Mr. John H. Barry, who knew him from the beginning of his career in New York, "was his distinction of character. To those he knew and liked he revealed himself as a man of singular refinement. He had beautiful, simple manners, a low voice, and a most charming air of self-effacement. For the glory of being famous he cared little. He He had a dislike of being lionized. Lionhunting women filled him with alarm. In fact he was afraid of nearly all women." But fame had come and with it came a vein of ancestral reminiscence and a return in imagination to the days of childhood. His marriage, in 1907, to the sweetheart and the only sweetheart of the Greensboro

years, his visits to Mrs. Porter's home in Asheville, and his affectionate allusions to his father and mother show plainly a tendency to relax the cordon about him and to re-knit the ties and associations of youth. O. Henry was becoming Will Porter again.

HIS INHERITED TRAITS

William Sydney Porter was named after his mother's father, William Swaim, and his father's father, Sydney Porter. He was always called Will Porter in the early days except by his grandmother on his father's side who occasionally called him Sydney.

His grandmother, who married Lyndon Swaim after the death of her husband, William Swaim, was Abia Shirley or (Abiah Shirly), daughter of Daniel Shirley, a wealthy planter, of Princess Anne County, Virginia. "The original Abia Shirley," O. Henry once remarked to an intimate friend in New York, "was related to the House of Stuart but she ran off with a Catholic priest." Where O. Henry learned this bit of ancestral history I do not know; but that the Shirley family to which his grandmother traced her lineage was among the most loyal adherents of the Stuarts admits of little doubt.

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.

Her 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 Sydney Porter three months later. Only seven years afterward she, too, died.

Whether he 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 humor 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 pictures-exercised a directive and lasting influence upon him.

Lyndon Swaim gave his stepdaughter every educational advantage that Greensboro offered, and then as now no town in North Carolina offered as many to women. There were two colleges for women on old West Market Street, both very near and one almost opposite the house in which O. Henry's mother was to spend all of her short married life. She attended both schools, graduating from the Greensboro Female College in 1850, the year in which Dr. Charles F. Deems assumed control. Her graduating essay bore the strangely prophetic title, "The Influence of Misfortune on the Gifted."

THE

PROGENITOR OF THE WANDERLUST

O. Henry's grandparents on his father's side were Sydney Porter and Ruth Coffyn Worth. Sydney Porter was a tall, jolly, heavy-set man but with little of the force or thrift of the family into which he married. He came from Connecticut to North Carolina about the year 1823 as the agent of a clock company.

His most characteristic trait, however, the quality that he was to transmit to his grandson, was not business efficiency. It was his sunny good humor. "He joked and laughed at his work," says an old citizen, "and was especially beloved by children."

The memory of Sydney Porter that survives is clear in outline though faint in content. From him O. Henry got also the wanderlust that urged him unceasingly from place to place. Clocks were never as interesting to Grandpa Porter as were the faces and places that he saw on his frequent tours. He handed down his He handed down his name and a goodly share of his disposition to his grandson and, as the original rolling stone, might well typify if he did not suggest the title of the first and only periodical that O. Henry was to edit.

O. Henry's father, Dr. Algernon Sydney Porter, was the oldest of seven children.

During his early years O. Henry cared little for indoor games and sports. In chess he could hold his own with the veterans of the town before he had reached his 'teens, and in roller-skating he won the championship prize. He was also a good boxer and a trained fencer. But his favorite recreation was to roam the fields and woods with a congenial companion.

An outing with a set purpose was never to his liking. His pleasure was in merely being in the woods or on the bank of a stream, in surrendering himself to the mood rather than to the purpose of the occasion, and in interpreting in waggish ways everything said or done or seen. He was always shy, his exuberant humor and rare gift of story-telling seeming to take flight within the walls of a house. He preferred the front gate or, as a halfway station, the porch. Even in a small group out of doors, if there was a stranger or one uncongenial companion, O. Henry would not be heard from. But the next day he would tell you what happened and with such a wealth of original comment and keenness of insight and alchemy of exaggeration, all framed in a droll or dramatic story, that you would think you had missed the time of your life in not being present.

"His education is about a common school one," said O. Henry of himself in the words already cited, "but he learns afterward from reading and life." His teacher and his only teacher was his aunt, Miss Evelina Maria Porter, known to every one in Greensboro as Miss Lina. Hers was undoubtedly the strongest personal influence brought to bear on O. Henry during his twenty years in North Carolina. The death of his mother when

he was only three years old and the increasing absorption of his father in futile inventions resulted in Miss Lina's taking the place of both parents, and this she did not only with whole-souled devotion but with rare and efficient intelligence.

O. Henry attended no other school and he attended this only to the age of fifteen. He was always a favorite with Miss Lina and with the other pupils. The gentleness of his disposition and his genius for original kinds of play won his schoolmates while his aunt held up his interest in his books, his good deportment, and his skill in drawing as worthy of all emulation. Miss Lina taught drawing, but O. Henry's sketches were almost from the start so far superior to hers that they were generally selected as the models. Some of his best free-hand sketches Miss Lina never saw, though she deserves the credit of having inspired them. She had a way of sending the arithmetic class to the blackboard while she paced the floor with the bundle of switches. O. Henry would work his "sum" with his right hand and sketch Miss Lina with his left at the same time.

I have often thought that Miss Lina must have been in O. Henry's thought when he wrote those suggestive words about Azalea Adair in "A Municipal Report":

She was a product of the old South, gently

nurtured in the sheltered life. Her learning was not broad, but was deep and of splendid originality in its somewhat narrow scope. She had been educated at home, and her knowledge of the world was derived from inference and by inspiration. Of such is the precious, small group of essayists made. While she talked to me I kept brushing my fingers, trying, unconsciously, to rid them guiltily of the absent

dust from the half-calf backs of Lamb, Chaucer, Hazlitt, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, and Hood. She was exquisite; she was a valuable discovery. Nearly everybody nowadays knows too much-oh, so much too much-of real life.

But when O. Henry's boyhood friends recall him it is not usually as a pupil in Miss Lina's school; nor is it as the writer in the great city. It is as the clerk in his uncle Clark Porter's drug store on Elm Street, opposite the old Benlow Hotel. Here he was known and loved by old and

young, black and white, rich and poor. He was the wag of the town, but so quiet, so unobtrusive, so apparently preoccupied that it was his pencil rather than his tongue that spread his local fame.

DRUG CLERK

His five years in his uncle's drug store meant much to him as a cartoonist. His feeling for the ludicrous, for the odd, for the distinctive, in speech, tone, appearance, conduct, or character responded instantly to the appeal made by the drug store constituency. This store was the rendezvous of all classes, though the rear room was reserved for the more elect. The two rooms constituted in fact the social, political, and anecdotal clearing house of the town. The patronage of the grocery stores and dry-goods stores was controlled in part by denominational lines, but everybody patronized the drug store. It was also a sort of physical confessional. The man who would expend only a few words in purchasing a ham or a hat would talk half an hour of his aches and ills or those of his family before buying twenty-five cents' worth of pills or a ten-cent bottle of liniment. When the ham or the hat was paid for and taken away there was usually an end of it. Not so with the pills or the liniment. his personal or family history and to add a The patient usually came back to continue sketch of the character and conduct of the pills or liniment. All this was grist to O. Henry's mill.

His reading at this time as well as his drawing had begun to widen and deepen. At first he had been gripped by the dime novel. After the dime novel came the supernatural story, and, before leaving Greensboro, O. Henry had passed to the stage represented in his own statement: "I used to read nothing but the classics." In fact, his reading and his close confinement in the drug store had begun to threaten his health. His mother and grandmother had both died of consumption and O. Henry, never robust, was under the obsession that he had already entered upon his fateful inheritance.

The release came unexpectedly. Three sons of Dr. James K. Hall, Lee, Dick, and