He carried a black derby, high-crowned, and walked with a springy,
noiseless step. To meet him for the first time you felt his most
notable quality to be reticence, not a reticence of social timidity,
but a reticence of deliberateness. If you also were observing, you
would soon understand that his reticence proceeded from the fact
that civilly yet masterfully he was taking in every item of the "you"
being presented to him to the accompaniment of convention's
phrases and ideas, together with the "you" behind this presentation.
It was because he was able thus to assemble and sift all the multi-
farious elements of a personality with sleight-of-hand swiftness
that you find him characterizing a person or a neighborhood in a
sentence or two; and once I heard him characterize a list of editors
he knew each in a phrase.
On his first afternoon in New York we took him on our usual walk
uptown from Duane Street to about Madison Square. That was
a long walk for O. Henry, as any who knew him may witness. An-
other long one was when he walked about a mile over a fairly high
hill with me on zigzag path through autumn woods. I showed him
plains below us and hills stretching away so far and blue they look
like the illimitable sea from the deck of an ocean liner. But it was not
until we approached the station from which we were to take the
train back to New York that he showed the least sign of animation.
