up lay something ultra-sensitive that took impressions far too easily. Not only did it vibrate with unnecessary eagerness to every change in sky and sea, but to every shade of attitude and manner in my fellows as well. I seemed covered with sore and tender places into which New York rubbed salt and acid every hour of the day. It wounded, not alone because I felt unhappy, but of itself. It hit me where it pleased. The awful city, with its torrential, headlong life, held for me something of the monstrous. Everything about it was exaggerated. Its racing speed, its roofs amid the clouds with the canyon gulfs below, its gaudy avenues dripping gold that ran almost arm in arm with streets little better than sewers of human decay and misery, its frantic noise, both of voices and mechanism, its lavishly organized charity and boastful splendour, and its deep corruption in the grip of a heartless and degraded Tammany--it was all this that painted the horror into my imagination as of something monstrous, non-human, almost unearthly. It became, for me, a scab on the skin of the planet, brilliant with the hues of fever, moving all over with its teeming microbes. I felt it, indeed, but half civilized.
This note of how I felt in these--my early years--rose up again the other day, as I read what O. Henry wrote to his outlaw friend from the Ohio Penitentiary about it. Al Jennings had just been pardoned. O. Henry had finished his terms some years before. They met again in a West 26th Street hotel, not far from my own room in Mrs. Bernstein's house. They talked of their terrible prison days.
"It's good you've been there," said O. Henry. "It's the proper vestibule to this city of Damned Souls. The crooks there are straight compared with the business thieves here. If you've got $2 on you, invest it now or they'll
take it away from you before morning."
