I'm Hello everybody. Thanks for joining us at 1001 classic short stories and tales.

Today's story is from one of our favorite classic authors,

O'Henry, and deals with a pair of small-time swindlers who reunite in New York City and decide

to make their fortune in art. New York City in the very early 1900s was a favorite target for

O'Henry, and his stories provide a window to the Victorian days in New York when

ladies carry parasols, and there was an Irish cup on every corner.

And now, Babes in the Jungle, by O'Henry.

Montague Silver, the finest street man and art grafter in the West, says to me once in Little

Rock, if you ever lose your mind, Billy, and get too old to do honest swindling among grown men,

go to New York. In the West, a sucker is born every minute, but in New York they appear in chunks of row.

You can't count them!

Two years afterward I found that I couldn't remember the names of the Russian admirals,

and I noticed some gray hairs over my left ear, so I knew the time had arrived for me to take Silver's advice.

I struck New York about noon one day, and took a walk up Broadway, and I run against Silver himself,

all encompassed up in a spacious kind of haberdashery, leaning against the hotel,

and rubbing the half moons on his nails with a silk handkerchief.

Poresis or superannuated? I asks him.

Hello, Billy, says Silver. I'm glad to see you. Yes, it seemed to me that the West was

accumulating a little too much wiseness.

I've been saving New York for dessert.

I know it's a low-down trick to take things from these people.

They only know this and that and pass to and fro and think, ever and anon.

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