[B] William Sidney Porter, 1862-1910, son of Algernon Sidney Porter, physician, was born, bred, and meagerly educated in Greensboro, North Carolina. In Greensboro he was drug clerk; in Texas he was amateur ranchman, land-office clerk, editor, and bank teller. Convicted of misuse of bank funds on insufficient evidence (which he supplemented by the insanity of flight), he passed three years and three months in the Ohio State Penitentiary at Columbus. Release was the prelude to life in New York, to story-writing, to rapid and wide-spread fame. Latterly, his stories, published in New York journals and in book form, were consumed by the public with an avidity which his premature death, in 1910, scarcely checked. The pen-name, O. Henry, is almost certainly borrowed from a French chemist Etienne-Ossian Henry, whose abridged name he fell upon in his pharmacal researches. See the interesting "O. Henry Biography" by C. Alphonso Smith. [C] O Henry's stories have been known to coincide with earlier work in a fashion which dims the novelty of the tale without clouding the originality of the author. I thought the brilliant "Harlem Tragedy" (in the "Trimmed Lamp") unique through sheer audacity, but the other day I found its motive repeated with singular exactness in Montesquieu's "Lettres Persanes" (Letter LI). [D] "These views, as usual, pleased some more, others less; some chid and calumniated me, and laid it to me as a crime that I had dared to depart from the precepts and opinions of all Anatomists."--De Motu Cordis, chap. i. [E] This visit (in the early eighties) had another relish. The inn coffee-room had a copy of Mr. Freeman's book on the adjoining Cathedral, and this was copiously annotated in a beautiful and scholarly hand, but in a most virulent spirit. "Why can't you call things by their plain names?" (in reference to the historian's Macaulayesque periphrases) etc. I have often wondered who the annotator was. [F] When I went up this March to help man the last ditch for Greek, I happened to mention "Archdeacon": and my interlocutor told me that he believed no college now brewed within its walls. After the defeat, I thought of the stages of the Decline and Fall of Things: and how a sad but noble ode might be written (by the right man) on the Fates of Greek and Beer at Oxford. He would probably refer in the first strophe to the close of the Eumenides; in its antistrophe to Mr. Swinburne's great adaptation thereof in regard to Carlyle and Newman; while the epode and any reduplication of the parts would be occupied by showing how the departing entities were of no equivocal magnificence like the Eumenides themselves; of no flawed perfection (at least as it seemed to their poet) like the two great English writers, but wholly admirable and beneficent--too good for the generation who would banish them, and whom they banished.