John would only lose his money.  He was a miner, not a writer, and he ought not to let John go to any expense.  The result of this line of thought was the Colorado River for the manuscript and the high road for the author.  The pictures, fortunately, were saved.  Most of them Porter gave later to Mrs. Hagelstein of San Angelo, Texas.  Mr. Maddox, by the way, finding a note from Joe that “explained all,” hastened to the river and recovered a few scraps of the great book that had lodged against a sandbar.  But there was no putting them together again.

So much for the title.  It is a real O. Henry title.  Contents of this last volume are drawn not only from letters, old newspaper files, and The Rolling Stone, but from magazines and unpublished manuscripts.  Of the short stories, several were written at the very height of his powers and popularity and were lost, inexplicably, but lost.  Of the poems, there are a few whose authorship might have been in doubt if the compiler of this collection had not secured external evidence that made them certainly the work of O. Henry.  Without this very strong evidence, they might have been rejected because they were not entirely the kind of poems the readers of O. Henry would expect from him.  Most of them however, were found in his own indubitable manuscript or over his own signature.

There is extant a mass of O. Henry correspondence that has not been included in this collection.  During the better part of a decade in New York City he wrote constantly to editors, and in many instances intimately.  This is very important material, and permission has been secured to use nearly all of it in a biographical volume that will be issued within the next two or three years.  The letters in this volume have been chosen as an “exihibit,” as early specimens of his writing and for their particularly characteristic turns of thought and phrase.  The collection is not “complete” in any historical sense.

1912.

H.P.S.

This record of births and deaths is copied from the Porter Family Bible, just lately discovered.

BIRTHS

ALGERNON SIDNEY PORTER
Son of
SIDNEY AND RUTH C. PORTER
Was born
August 22, 1825

MONDAY EVENING, May 29, 1858
Still-born Son of
A. S. AND M. V. PORTER

MONDAY, August 6, 1860, 9 o’clock P.M. 
SHIRLEY WORTH
Son of A. S. AND M. V. PORTER

THURSDAY, September 11, 1862, 9 o’clock P.M. 
WILLIAM SIDNEY [1]
Son of
A. S. AND M. V. PORTER

SUNDAY, March 26, 1865, at 8 o’clock A. M.
DAVID WEIR
Son of
A. S. AND M. V. PORTER

MARY JANE VIRGINIA SWAIM [2]
Daughter of
WILLIAM AND ABIAH SWAIM
Was born
February 12, 1833

DEATHS

MARY VIRGINIA PORTER
TUESDAY EVENING, September 26, 1865
At 7:30 o’clock