: O. Henry
: 13 Books of Stories
: Seltzer Books
: 9781455392872
: 1
: CHF 0.10
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 2259
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

This file includes the following book-length collections of short stories: Cabbages and Kings, The Four Million, The Gentle Grafter, Heart of the West, Options, Roads of Destiny, Rolling Stones, Sixes and Sevens, Strictly Business, The Trimmed Lamp, The Voice of the City, Waifs and Strays, and Whirligigs. According to Wikipedia: 'O. Henry was the pen name of American writer William Sydney Porter (September 11, 1862 - June 5, 1910). O. Henry short stories are known for wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings.... Most of O. Henry's stories are set in his own time, the early years of the 20th century. Many take place in New York City, and deal for the most part with ordinary people: clerks, policemen, waitresses. Fundamentally a product of his time, O. Henry's work provides one of the best English examples of catching the entire flavor of an age. Whether roaming the cattle-lands of Texas, exploring the art of the 'gentle grafter,' or investigating the tensions of class and wealth in turn-of-the-century New York, O. Henry had an inimitable hand for isolating some element of society and describing it with an incredible economy and grace of language. Some of his best and least-known work resides in the collection Cabbages and Kings, a series of stories which each explore some individual aspect of life in a paralytically sleepy Central American town while each advancing some aspect of the larger plot and relating back one to another in a complex structure which slowly explicates its own background even as it painstakingly erects a town which is one of the most detailed literary creations of the period. The Four Million is another collection of stories. It opens with a reference to Ward McAllister's 'assertion that there were only 'Four Hundred' people in New York City who were really worth noticing. But a wiser man has arisen-the census taker-and his larger estimate of human interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little stories of the 'Four Million.'' To O. Henry, everyone in New York counted. He had an obvious affection for the city, which he called 'Bagdad-on-the-Subway.'

Clancy was an American with an Irish diathesis and cosmopolitan proclivities.  Many businesses had claimed him, but not for long. The roadster's blood was in his veins.  The voice of the tintype was

 but one of the many callings that had wooed him upon so many roads. Sometimes he could be persuaded to oral construction of his voyages into the informal and egregious.  Tonight there were symptoms of divulgement in him.

 

"'Tis elegant weather for filibustering'," he volunteered. "It reminds me of the time I struggled to liberate a nation from the poisonous breath of a tyrant's clutch.  'Twas hard work. 'Tis straining to the back and makes corns on the hands."

 

"I didn't know you had ever lent your sword to an oppressed people," murmured Atwood, from the grass.

 

"I did," said Clancy;"and they turned it into a plowshare."

 

"What country was so fortunate as to secure your aid?" airily inquired Blanchard.

 

"Where's Kamchatka?" asked Clancy, with seeming irrelevance.

 

"Why, off Siberia somewhere in the Arctic regions," somebody answered, doubtfully.

 

"I thought that was the cold one," said Clancy, with a satisfied nod."I'm always gettin' the two names mixed.  'Twas Guatemala, then--the hot one--I've been filibusterin' with.  Ye'll find that country on the map.  'Tis in the district known as the tropics.  By the foresight of Providence, it lies on the coast so the geography men could run the names of the towns off into the water.  They're an inch long, small type, composed of Spanish dialects, and, 'tis my opinion, of the same system of syntax that blew up the ~Maine~.  Yes, 'twas that country I sailed against, single-handed, and endeavored to liberate it from a tyrannical government with a single-barrelled pickaxe, unloaded at that.  Ye don't understand, of course.  'Tis a statement demandin' elucidation and apologies.

 

"'Twas in New Orleans one morning about the first ofJune; I was standing down on the wharf, looking about at the ships in the river. There was a little steamer moored right opposite me that seemed about ready to sail.  The funnels of it were throwing out smoke, and a gang of roustabouts were carrying aboard a pile of boxes that was stacked up on the wharf.  The boxes were about two feet square, and something like four feet long, and they seemed to be pretty heavy.

 

"I walked over, careless, to the stack of boxes.  I saw one of them had been broken in handlin'.  'Twas curiosity made me pull up the loose top and look inside.  The box was packed full of Winchester rifles.  'So, so,' says I to myself; 'somebody's gettin' a twist on the neutrality laws.  Somebody's aidin' with munitions of war. I wonder where the popguns are goin'?'

 

"I heard somebody cough, and I turned around.  There stood a little, round, fat man with a brown face and white clothes, a first-class- looking little man, with a four-karat diamond on his finger and his eye full of interrogations and respects.  I judged he was a kind of foreigner--may be from Russia or Japan or the archipelagoes.

 

"'Hist!' says the round man, full of concealments and confidences. 'Will the senor respect the discoveryments he has made, that the mans on the ship shall not be acquaint?  The senor will be a gentleman that shall not expose one thing that by accident occur.'

 

"'Monseer,' says I--for I judged him to be a kind of Frenchman-- 'receive my most exasperated assurances that your secret is safe with James Clancy.  Furthermore, I will go so far as to remark, Veev la Liberty--