And the Yeah, Welcome back everyone to 1001 classic short stories and tales. This is your host John

Haggadorn and we've got two new O Henry's for you. The first one's called

The Making of a New Yorker and the second vanity and some Sables.

I think you'll enjoy them both.

The Making of a New Yorker by O'Henry

Besides many other things, Raggles was a poet. He was called a tramp, but that was only an elliptical way of saying that he was a philosopher, an artist, a traveler, a naturalist, and the discoverer. But most of all he was a poet. In all his life he never wrote a line of verse. He lived his poetry. His odyssey would have been a limerick had it been written, but to linger with the primary proposition,

Raggles was a poet.

Raggles' specialty had he been driven to ink and paper would have been sonnets to the cities. He studied cities as women studied their reflections in mirrors,

as children studied the glue and sawdust of a dislocated doll.

As the men who write about wild animals study the cages in the zoo.

A city to Raggles was not merely a pile of bricks and mortar, people by a certain number

of inhabitants.

It was a thing with a sole characteristic and distinct, an individual conglomeration of life with its own peculiar essence, flavor, and feeling.

2,000 miles to the north and south, east and west,

Raggles wandered in poetic fervor, taking the cities to his breast.

He footed it on dusty roads, or sped magnificently in freight cars, counting time as of no account.

And when he had found the heart of a city and listened to its secret confessions, he

straight on, restless, to another. Thickle raggles, but perhaps he had not met the Civic Corporation that could engage

and hold his critical fancy.

Through the ancient poets we have learned that cities are feminine.

So they were to poet Raggles.

And his mind carried a concrete and clear conception of the figure that symbolized and typified each one that he'd wooed.

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