The second story begins on the Atlantic Avenue platform of the Lexington Avenue subway.  It is 9 A.M., and a crowded train is pulling out.  Just before the train leaves a young man steps off one of the cars, leaving behind him (though not at once noticed) a rattan suitcase.  This young man disappears in the usual fashion, viz., by mingling with the crowd.  When the train gets to the end of the run the unclaimed suitcase is opened, and found to contain—­continued on page 186.

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Every now and then we take a stroll up Irving Place.  It is changing slowly, but it still has much of the flavour that Arthur Maurice had in mind when he christened It “the heart of O. Henry land.”  Number 55, the solid, bleached brownstone house where O. Henry once lived, is still there:  it seems to be some sort of ecclesiastical rendezvous, if one may judge by the letters C.H.A. on the screen and the pointed carving of the doorway.  Number 53, next door, always interests us greatly:  the windows give a glimpse of the most extraordinary number of cages of canaries.

The old German theatre seems to have changed its language:  the boards speak now in Yiddish.  The chiropractor and psycho-analyst has invaded the Place, as may be seen by a sign on the eastern side.  O. Henry would surely have told a yarn about him if he had been there fifteen years ago.  There are still quite a number of the old brown houses, with their iron railings and little patches of grass.  The chocolate factory still diffuses its pleasant candied whiff.  At noontime the street is full of the high-spirited pupils of the Washington Irving High School.  As for the Irving house itself, it is getting a new coat of paint.  The big corset works, we dare say, has come since O. Henry’s time.  We had quite an adventure there once.  We can’t remember how it came about, but for some reason or other we went to that building to see the chief engineer.  All we can remember about it was that he had been at sea at one time, and we went to see him on some maritime errand.  We found that he and his family lived in a comfortable apartment on the roof of the factory, and we remember making our way, with a good many blushes, through several hundred or thousand young ladies who were industriously working away at their employer’s business and who seemed to us to be giggling more than necessary.  After a good deal of hunting we found our way to a secret stair and reached our seafaring engineer of the corset factory in his eyrie, where (we remember) there were oil paintings of ships on the walls and his children played about on the roof as though on the deck of a vessel.