O HENRY - 100 S E L E C T E D STORIES 321

At the hotel that night the main topic of conversation, with the
possible exceptions of politics and prohibition, was the demise of
Major Caswell. I heard one man say to a group of listeners:
'In my opinion, gentlemen, Caswell was murdered by some of
these no-account niggers for his money. He had fifty dollars this
afternoon which he showed to several gentlemen in the hotel.
When he was found the money was not on his person.'
I left the city the next morning at nine, and as the train was
crossing the bridge over the Cumberland River I took out of my
pocket a yellow, horn, overcoat button the size of a fifty-cent
piece, with frayed ends of coarse twine hanging from it, and cast it
out of the window into the slow, muddy waters below.
I wonder what's doing in Buffalo!

LI

Compliments of the Season

THERE ARE NO MORE Christmas stories to write. Fiction is

exhausted; and newspaper items the next best, are manufactured
by clever young Journalists who have married early and have an
engagingly pessimistic view of life. Therefore, for seasonable
diversion, we are reduced to two very questionable sources - facts
and philosophy. W e will begin with - whichever you choose to
call it.
Children are pestilential little animals with which we have to
cope under a bewildering variety of conditions. Especially when
childish sorrows overwhelm them are we put to our wits' end. W e
exhaust our paltry store of consolation; and then beat them, sob­
bing, to sleep. Then we grovel in the dust of a million years, and
ask God why. Thus we call out of the rat-trap. As for the chil­
dren, no one understands them except old maids, hunchbacks,
and shepherd dogs.
Now come the facts in the case of the Rag-Doll, the Tatterde­
malion, and the Twenty-fifth of December.
On the tenth of that month the Child of the Millionaire lost her
rag-doll. There were many servants in the Millionaire's palace on
the Hudson, and these ransacked the house and grounds, but
without finding the lost treasure. The Child was a girl of five, and
one of those perverse little beasts that often wound the sensibili­
ties of wealthy parents by fixing their affections upon some vulgar,