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_The Rolling Stone_, but from magazines and unpublished manuscripts.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.