He had become the drug clerk of the prison, and in his spare hours he wrote incessantly, in order to forget the human anguish about him. He would take the outlaw stories of Jennings, the stories of all varieties of offenders in the prison, and transform them to his own uses. Outside was his little daughter, carefully kept in ignorance as to her father’s whereabouts; he must have money to send her a Christmas present, and so he ground out manuscripts and mailed them to magazines. And so once more, as in the case of Mark Twain, we see the spirit of bourgeois America, embodied in the personality of a woman, engaged in remodeling the soul of a genius. Here was a mass of material, palpitating with life, and ready to be shaped into one of the great tragic records of the ages. And here was a loving and tender-hearted, humorous and blundering Southern gentleman, with no grasp of social forces and no understanding of what had happened to him, engaged in sentimentalizing and feminizing that mass of material. Take one example, the story of “Jimmy Valentine,” the most popular character O. Henry created. This story was made into a play, which had enormous success both in America and England; it was stolen and dramatized several times in France and Spain; it was the source of a new stage variety, what is known as the “crook play.” The story tells about a little child who is locked by accident in a bank vault, and will be suffocated in a few hours. A famous safe-cracker learns of her plight and opens the safe, and thereby reveals himself to a detective who has been hunting him. But the detective, being a magazine detective, is kind-hearted and easily moved to tears; he foregoes the glory and reward of capturing a famous crook, and the crook retires to be good and happy ever afterwards in the company of the little child. Such is the underworld according to American magazine mythology. And now, what was the true story of “Jimmy Valentine”? There was a great scandal in the state of Ohio; some high-class crooks, of the kind who never go to the penitentiary, had stolen millions of dollars, and locked all the papers in a vault and escaped. These papers must be had, and it was not possible to blow open the vault with dynamite, for fear of destroying them. So the governor applied to the penitentiary for a competent safe-cracking artist. A man came forward. He had been a gutter-rat, starving in childhood, like Al Jennings, who tells his story. At the age of eleven, a “ravenous little rag-picker,” he had broken into a box-car and stolen ten cents worth of crackers, and had been sent to a “reformatory,” and turned out a master-crook, at eighteen. A year later they had sent him to the penitentiary for life--an “habitual criminal.” Now he was dying of tuberculosis, and his old mother was dying of grief, because she had not been permitted to see her son, or even to hear from him for sixteen years.