Welcome back, everyone, the 1001 classic short stories and tales.

This is your host, John Hagedorn.

Today, a story from one of our favorite authors here,

O'Henry. This one called Mammin and the Archer. O'Henry wrote this in 1906. The story,

A retired soap manufacturer named Anthony Rockwell worships Mammon, i.e. money above everything else. The archer of the story's

title is Cupid, the God of Love. Rockwell tells his son Richard that money can buy him anything

in life, but Richard points out that the girl he loves is leaving in a few days' time, and he hasn't

managed to win her hand. He takes a ring with him, which his mother left to him in her will,

with the intention of asking his sweetheart to marry him. But he drops the ring, and—well, I

can't tell you anything more, but let's just say that once again O'Henry's gift for twist endings

turns things around. And now, Mammon and the Archer. By O'Henry. Old Anthony Rockwall, retired manufacturer

and proprietor of Rockwall's Eureka Soap, looked out the library window of his Fifth Avenue mansion and grinned.

And grinned! The aristocratic club man, G. Van Schuylyde Suffolk Jones, came out to his waiting motor car, wrinkling a contumulingle's nostril, as usual, at the Italian Renaissance sculpture of the soap palace's front elevation.

"'Stuck up old statuette of nothing doing,' commented the ex-soap king.

"'The Eden Museum will get that old frozen nestle road yet if you don't watch out.

I'll have this house painted red, white, and blue next summer, and see if that'll make

his Dutch nose turn up any higher. And then Anthony Rockwall, who never cared for bells, went to

the door of his library and shouted, Mike, in the same voice that it once chipped off pieces of

the Welkin on the Kansas prairies. "'Tell my son,' said Anthony, to the answering menial,

to come in here before he leaves the house.

When young Rockwall entered the library,

the old man laid aside his newspaper,

...