“Yes,” said I, “but do you happen to know if he had anything upon him by any chance when he died?”

“Not to my knowledge,” said the Superintendent.

And there the matter rests.

XII.  THE GIFT OF THE MAGI[*] (1905)

[* From “The Four Million.”  Used by special arrangement with Doubleday, Page & Company, publishers of O. Henry’s Works.]

BY O. HENRY[*] (1862-1910)

[*:  The pen-name of William Sidney Porter.]

[Setting.  Christmas Eve in New York and a furnished flat at $8 per week make the setting of this perfect little story.  Della has only $1.87 with which to buy a present for Jim and outside is “a grey cat walking a grey fence in a grey backyard.”  But there is a spirit within that is to make the modest flat a place of glory and this Christmas Eve memorable in short-story annals.  The flat is the stable with the manger, and New York widens into Bethlehem.

Plot.  “And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him; and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts:  gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.”  These were the gifts of the magi, but their gift was love.  The infant Christ could make no use of gold or frankincense or myrrh, nor could Della and Jim make use of the combs and the chain; but the love that prompted the giving shines all the more resplendent because the gifts, humanly speaking, were egregious misfits.  “That the gold at least,” says a recent commentator, “would be highly serviceable to the parents in their unexpected journey to Egypt and during their stay there—­thus much at least admits of no dispute.”  Perhaps so.  But read the famous passage once more and turn again to O. Henry’s story.  Which interpretation goes deeper into the heart of the incident?  Which leaves you more in love with love?

Characters.  Della and Jim have been said to illustrate the “story of cross-purposes.”  But the phrase is not well used.  Their purposes were one; only their methods crossed.  O. Henry rarely comments on his characters, but he has here picked out one quality of these “two foolish children in a flat” for unreserved praise:  “Of all who give gifts these two were the wisest.  Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest.  Everywhere they are wisest.  They are the magi.”  If the magi, as O. Henry says, “invented the art of giving Christmas presents,” Della and Jim re-discovered it.  We have had no two characters in whose company it is better to leave our study of the short story.]

One dollar and eighty-seven cents.  That was all.  And sixty cents of it was in pennies.  Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied.  Three times Della counted it.  One dollar and eighty-seven cents.  And the next day would be Christmas.