O. Henry

                     The Handbook of Hymen

'TIS THE OPINION OF MYSELF, Sanderson Pratt, who sets this down, that 
the educational system of the United States should be in the hands of 
the weather bureau. I can give you good reasons for it; and you can't 
tell me why our college professors shouldn't be transferred to the 
meteorological department. They have been learned to read; and they 
could very easily glance at the morning papers and then wire in to the 
main office what kind of weather to expect. But there's the other side 
of the proposition. I am going on to tell you how the weather 
furnished me and Idaho Green with an elegant education.
   We was up in the Bitter Root Mountains over the Montana line 
prospecting for gold. A chin-whiskered man in Walla-Walla, carrying a 
line of hope as excess baggage, had grubstaked us; and there we was in 
the foothills pecking away, with enough grub on hand to last an army 
through a peace conference.
   Along one day comes a mail-rider over the mountains from Carlos, 
and stops to eat three cans of greengages, and leave us a newspaper of 
modern date. This paper prints a system of premonitions of the 
weather, and the card it dealt Bitter Root Mountains from the bottom 
of the deck was `warmer and fair, with light  westerly breezes.'
   That evening it began to snow, with the wind strong in the east. Me 
and Idaho moved camp into an old empty cabin higher. up the mountain, 
thinking it was only a November flurry. But after falling three foot 
on a level it went to work in earnest; and we knew we was snowed in. 
We got in plenty of firewood before it got deep, and we had grub 
enough for two months, so we let the elements rage and cut up all they 
thought proper.
   If you want to instigate the art of manslaughter just shut two men 
up in a eighteen by twenty-foot cabin for a month. Human nature won't 
stand it.
   When the first snowflakes fell me and Idaho Green laughed at each 
other's jokes and praised the stuff we turned out of a skillet and 
called bread. At the end of three weeks Idaho makes this kind ~ '-'`' 
of an edict to me. Says he -
   `I never exactly heard sour milk dropping out of a balloon on the 
bottom of a tin pan, but I have an idea it would be music of the 
spears compared to this attenuated stream of asphyxiated thought that 
emanates out of your organs of conversation. The kind of half 
masticated noises that you emit every day puts me in mind of a cow's 
cud, only she's lady enough to keep hers to herself, and you ain't.'
   `Mr. Green,' says I, `you having been a friend of mine once, I have 
some hesitations in confessing to you that if I had my choice for 
society between you and a common yellow, three-legged cur pup, one of 
the inmates of this here cabin would be wagging a tail just at 
present.'
   This way we goes on for two or three days, and then we quits 
speaking to one another. We divides up the cooking implements, and 
Idaho cooks his grub on one side of the fireplace and me on the other. 
The snow is up to the windows, and we have to keep a fire all day.
   You see me and Idaho never had any education beyond reading and 
doing `if John had three apples and James five' on a slate. We never 
felt any special need for a university degree, though we had acquired 
a species of intrinsic intelligence in knocking around the world that 
we could use in emergencies. But, snow-bound in that cabin in the 
Bitter Roots, we felt for the first time that if we had studied Homer 
or Greek and fractions and the higher branches of information, we'd 
have had some resources in the line of meditation and private thought. 
I've seen them Eastern college fellows working in camps all through 
the West, and I never noticed but what education was less of a 
drawback to 'em than you would think. Why, once over on Snake River, 
when Andrew McWilliam's saddle-horse got the botts, he sent a 
buckboard ten miles for one of these strangers that claimed to be a 
botanist But that horse died.
   One morning Idaho was poking around with a stick on top of a litde 
shelf that was too high to reach. Two books fell down to the floor. I 
started toward 'em, but caught Idaho's eye. He speaks for the first 
time in a week.
   `Don't burn your fingers,' says he. `In spite of the fact that 
you're only fit to be the companion of a sleeping mud-turtle, I'll 
give you a square deal. And that's more than your parents did when 
they turned you loose in the world with the sociability of a 
rattlesnake and the bedside manner of a frozen turnip. I'll play you a 
game of seven-up, the winner to pick up his choice of the books, the 
loser to take the other.'
   We played; -and Idaho won. He picked up his book, and I took mine. 
Then each of us got on his side of the house and went to reading.
   I never was as glad to see a ten-ounce nugget as I was that book. 
And Idaho looked at his like a kid looks at a stick of candy.
   Mine was a little book about five by six inches called Herkimer's 
Handbook of Indispensable Information. I may be wrong, but I think 
that was the greatest book that ever was written. I've got it to-day; 
and I can stump you or any man fifty times in five minutes with the 
information in it. Talk about Solomon or the New York Tribune! 
Herkimer had cases on both of'em. That man must have put in fifty 
years and travelled a million miles to find out all that stuf£ There 
was the population of all cities in it, and the way to tell a girl's 
age, and the number of teeth a camel has. It told you the longest 
tunnel in the world, the number of the stars, how long it takes for 
chicken-pox to break out, what a lady's neck ought to measure, the 
veto powers of Governors, the dates of the Roman aqueducts, how many 
pounds of rice going without three beers a day would buy, the average 
annual temperature of Augusta, Maine, the quantity of seed required to 
plant an acre of carrots in drills, antidotes for poisons, the number 
of hairs on a blonde lady's head, how to preserve eggs, the height of 
all the mountains in the world, and the dates of all wars and battles, 
and how to restore drowned persons, and sunstroke, and the number of 
tacks in a pound, and how to make dynamite and flowers and beds, and 
what to do before the doctor comes - and a hundred times as many 
things besides. If there was anything Herkimer didn't know I didn't 
miss it out of the book.
   I sat and read that book for four hours. All the wonders of 
education was compressed in it. I forgot the snow, and I forgot that 
me and old Idaho was on the outs. He was sitting still on a stool 
reading away with a kind of partly soft and partly mysterious look 
shining through his tan-bark whiskers.
   `Idaho,' says I, `what kind of a book is yours?'
   Idaho must have forgot, too, for he answered moderate, without any 
slander or malignity.
   `Why,' says he, `this here seems to be a volume by Homer K. M.'    
   `Homer K. M. what?' I asks.
   `Why, just Homer K. M.,' says he.
   `You're a liar,' says I, a little riled that Idaho should try to 
put me up a tree. `No man is going 'round signing books with his 
initials. If it's Homer K. M. Spoopendyke, or Homer K. M. McSweeney, 
or Homer K. M. Jones, why don't you say so like a man instead of 
biting off the end of it like a calf chewing off the tail of a shirt 
on a clothes-line?'
   `I put it to you straight, Sandy,' says Idaho, quiet. `It's a poem 
book,' says he, `by Homer K. M. I couldn't get colour out of it at 
first, but there's a vein if you follow it up. I wouldn't have missed 
this book for a pair of red blankets.'
   `You're welcome to it,' says I. `What I want is a disinterested 
statement of facts for the mind to work on, and that's what I seem to 
find in the book I've drawn.'
   `What you've got,' says Idaho, `is statistics, the lowest grade of 
information that exists. They'll poison your mind. Give me old K. M.'s 
system of surmises. He seems to be a kind of a wine agent. His regular 
toast is "nothing doing," and he seems to have a grouch but he keeps 
it so well lubricated with booze that his worst kicks sound like an 
invitation to split a quart. But it's poetry,' says Idaho, `and I have 
sensations of scorn for that truck of yours that tries to convey sense 
in feet and inches. When it comes to explaining the instinct of 
philosophy through the art of nature, old K. M. has got your man beat 
by drills, rows, paragraphs, chest measurement, and average annual 
rainfall.'
   So that's the way me and Idaho had it. Day and night all the 
excitement we got was studying our books. That snowstorm sure fixed us 
with a fine lot of attainments apiece. By the time the snow melted, if 
you had stepped up to me suddenly and said: `Sanderson Pratt, what 
would it cost per square foot to lay a roof with twenty by twenty-
eight tin at nine dollars and fifty cents per box?' I'd have told you 
as quick as light could travel the length of a spade-handle at the 
rate of one hundred and ninety-two thousand miles per second. How many 
can do it? You wake up 'most any man you know in the middle of the 
night, and ask him quick to tell you the number of bones in the human 
skeleton exclusive of the teeth, or what percentage of the vote of the 
Nebraska Legislature overrules a veto. Will he tell you? Try him and 
see.
   About what benefit Idaho got out of his poetry book I didn't 
exactly know. Idaho boosted the wine agent every time he opened his 
mouth; but I wasn't so sure.
   This Homer K. M., from what leaked out of his libretto through 
Idaho, seemed to me to be a kind of a dog who looked at life like it 
was a tin can tied to his tail. After running himself half to death, 
he sits down, hangs his tongue out, and looks at the can and says -
   `Oh, well, since we can't shake the growler, let's get it filled at 
the corner, and all have a drink on me.'
   Besides that, it seems he was a Persian; and I never hear of Persia 
producing anything worth mentioning unless it was Turkish rugs and 
Maltese cats.
   That spring me and Idaho struck pay ore. It was a habit of ours to 
sell out quick and keep moving. We unloaded on our grub-staker for 
eight thousand dollars apiece; and then we drifted down to this little 
town of Rosa, on the Salmon River, to rest up, and get some human 
grub, and have our whiskers harvested.
   Rosa was no mining camp. It laid in the valley, and was as free of 
uproar and pestilence as one of them rural towns in the country. There 
was a three-mile trolley line champing its bit in the environs; and me 
and Idaho spent a week riding on one of the cars, dropping off of 
nights at the Sunset View Hotel. Being now well read as well as 
travelled, we was soon pro re nata with the best society in Rosa, and 
was invited out to the most dressed-up and high-toned entertainments. 
It was at a piano recital and quail-eating contest in the city hall, 
for the benefit of the fire company, that me and Idaho first met Mrs. 
De Ormond Sampson, the queen of Rosa society.
   Mrs. Sampson was a widow, and owned the only two-story house in 
town. It was painted yellow, and whichever way you looked from you 
could see it as plain as egg on the chin of and O'Grady on a Friday. 
Twenty-two men in Rosa besides me and Idaho was trying to stake a 
claim on that yellow house.
   There was a dance after the song-books and quail bones had been 
raked out of the hall. Twenty-three of the bunch galloped over to Mrs. 
Sampson and asked for a dance. I side-stepped the two-step, and asked 
permission to escort her home. That's where I made a hit.
   On the way home says she -
   'Ain't the stars lovely and bright to-night, Mr Pratt?'
   `For the chance they've got,' says I, `they're humping them-selves 
in a mighty creditable way. That big one you see is sixty-six-billions 
of miles distant. It took thirty-six years for its light to reach us. 
With an eighteen-foot telescope you can see forty-three millions of 
'em, including them of the thirteenth magnitude, which, if one was to 
go out now, you would keep on seeing it for twenty-seven hundred 
years.'
   'My!' says Mrs. Sampson. `I never knew that before. How warm ~t is! 
I'm as damp as I can be from dancing so much.'
   `That's easy to account for,' says I, `when you happen to know that 
you've got two million sweat-glands working all at once. If every one 
of your perspiratory ducts, which are a quarter of an inch long, was 
placed end to end, they would reach a distance of seven miles.'
   `Lawsy!' says Mrs. Sampson. `It sounds like an irrigation ditch you 
was describing, Mr. Pratt. How do you get all this knowledge of 
formation?'
   ``From observation, Mrs. Sampson,' I tells her. `I keep my eyes 
open when I go about the world.'
`Mr. Pratt,' says she, `I always did admire a man of education. There 
are so few scholars among the sap-headed plug-uglies of this town that 
it is a real pleasure to converse with a gentleman of culture. I'd be 
gratified to have you call at my house whenever you ' feel so 
inclined.'
   And that was the way I got the goodwill of the lady in the yellow 
house. Every Tuesday and Friday evenings I used to go there and tell 
her about the wonders of the universe as discovered, tabulated, and 
compiled from nature by Herkimer. Idaho and the other gay Lutherans of 
the town got every minute of the rest of the week that they could.
   I never imagined that Idaho was trying to work on Mrs. Sampson with 
old K. M.'s rules of courtship till one afternoon when I was on my way 
over to take her a basket of wild hog-plums. I met the lady coming 
down the lane that led to her house. Her eyes was snapping, and her 
hat made a dangerous dip over one eye.
   `Mr. Pratt,' she opens up, `this Mr. Green is a friend of yours, I 
believe.'
   `For nine years,' say I.
   `Cut him out,' says she. `He's no gentleman!'
   `Why, ma'am,' say$ I, `he's a plain incumbent of the mountains, 
with asperities and the usual failings of a spendthrift and a liar, 
but I never on the most momentous occasion had the heart to deny that 
he was a gentleman. It may be that in haberdashery and the sense of 
arrogance and display Idaho offends the eye, but inside, ma'am, I've 
found him impervious to the lower grades of crime and obesity. After 
nine years of Idaho's society, Mrs. Sampson,' I winds up, `I should 
hate to impute him, and I should hate to see him imputed.'
   `It's right plausible of you, Mr. Pratt,' says Mrs. Sampson, `to 
take up the curmudgeons in your friend's behalf; but it don't alter 
the fact that he has made proposals to me sufficiently obnoxious to 
ruffle the ignominy of any lady.'
   `Why, now, now, now!' says I. `Old Idaho do that! I could believe 
it of myself sooner. I never knew but one thing to deride in him; and 
a blizzard was responsible for that. Once while we was snowbound in 
the mountains he became a prey to a kind of spurious and uneven 
poetry, which may have corrupted his demeanour.'
   `It has,' says Mrs. Sampson. `Ever since I knew him he has been 
reciting to me a lot of irreligious rhymes by some person he calls 
Ruby Ott, and who is no better than she should be, if you judge by her 
poetry.'
   `Then Idaho has struck a new book,' says I, `for the one he had was 
by a man who writes under the nom de plume of K. M.'
   `He'd better have stuck to it,' says Mrs. Sampson, `whatever it 
was. And to-day he caps the vortex. I get a bunch of flowers from him, 
and on 'em is pinned a note. Now, Mr. Pratt, you know a lady when you 
see her; and you know how I stand in Rosa society. Do you think for a 
moment that I'd skip out to the woods with a man along with a jug of 
wine and a loaf of bread, and go singing and cavorting up and down 
under the trees with him? I take a little claret with my meals, but 
I'm not in the habit of packing a jug of it into the brush and raising 
Cain in any such style as that. And of course he'd bring his book of 
verses along too. He said so. Let him go on his scandalous picnics 
alone! Or let him take his Ruby Ott with him. I reckon she wouldn't 
kick unless it was on account of there being too much bread along. And 
what do you think of your gentleman friend now, Mr. Pratt?'
   `Well, 'm,' says I, `it may be that Idaho's invitation was a kind 
of poetry, and meant no harm. Maybe it belonged to the class of rhymes 
they call figurative. They offend law and order, but they get sent 
through the mails on the ground that they mean something that they 
don't say. I'd be glad on Idaho's account if you'd overlook it,' says 
I, `and let us extricate our minds from the low regions of poetry to 
the higher planes of fact and fancy. On a beautiful afternoon like 
this, Mrs. Sampson,' I goes on, `we should let our thoughts dwell 
accordingly. Though it is warm here, we should remember that at the 
equator the line of perpetual frost is at an altitude of fifteen 
thousand feet. Between the latitudes of forty degrees and forty-nine 
degrees it is from four thousand to nine thousand feet.'
   `Oh, Mr. Pratt,' says Mrs. Sampson, `it's such a comfort to hear 
you say them beautiful facts after getting such a jar from that minx 
of a Ruby's poetry!'
   `Let us sit on this log at the roadside,' says I, `and forget the  
inhumanity and ribaldry of the poets It is in the glorious columns of 
ascertained facts and legalized measures that beauty is to be found. 
In this very log we sit upon, Mrs. Sampson,' says I, `is statistics 
more wonderful than any poem. The rings show it was sixty years old. 
At the depth of two thousand feet it would become coal in three 
thousand years. The deepest coal mine in the world is at Killingworth, 
near Newcastle. A box four feet long, three feet wide, and two feet 
eight inches deep will hold one ton of coal. If an artery is cut, 
compress it above the wound. A man's leg contains thirty bones. The 
Tower of London was burned in 1841.'
   `Go on, Mr. Pratt,' says Mrs. Sampson. `Them ideas is so original 
and soothing. I think statistics are just as lovely as they can be.'
But it wasn't till two weeks later that I got all that was coming to 
me out of Herkimer.
   One night I was waked up by folks hollering `Fire!' all around. I 
jumped up and dressed and went out of the hotel to enjoy the scene. 
When I seen it was Mrs. Sampson's house, I gave forth a kind of yell, 
and I was there in two minutes.
   The whole lower story of the yellow house was in flames, and every 
masculine, feminine, and canine in Rosa was there, screeching and 
barking and getting in the way of the firemen. I saw Idaho trying to 
get away from six firemen who were holding him. They was telling him 
the whole place was on fire downstairs, and no man could go in it and 
come out alive.
   `Where's Mrs. Sampson?' I asks.
   `She hasn't been seen,' says one of the firemen. `She sleeps 
upstairs. We've tried to get in, but we can't, and our company hasn't 
got any ladders yet.
   I runs around to the light of the big blaze, and pulls the Hand-
book out of my inside pocket. I kind of laughed when I felt it in my 
hands - I reckon I was some daffy with the sensation of excitement.
   `Herky, old boy,' I says to it, as I flipped over the pages, `you 
ain't ever lied to me yet, and you ain't ever throwed me down at a 
scratch yet. Tell me what, old boy, tell me what!' says I.
   I turned to `What to do in Case of Accidents,' on page 117. I run 
my finger down the page, and struck it. Good old Herkimer, he never 
overlooked anything! It said -
   `SUFFOCATION FROM INHALING SMOKE OR GAS. - There iS nothing better 
than flax-seed. Place a few seed in the outer corner of the eye.'
I shoved the Handbook back in my pocket, and grabbed a boy that was 
running by.
   `Here,' says I, giving him some money, `run to the drug store and 
bring a dollar's worth of flaxseed. Hurry, and you'll get another one 
for yourself. Now,' I sings out to the crowd, `we'll have Mrs. 
Sampson!' And I throws away my coat and hat.
   Four of the firemen and citizens grabs hold of me. It's sure death, 
they say, to go in the house, for the floors was beginning to fall 
through
   `How in blazes,' I sings out, kind of laughing yet, but not feeling 
like it, `do you expect me to put flax-seed in a eye without the eye?'
   I jabbed each elbow in a fireman's face, kicked the bark off of one 
citizen's shin, and tripped the other one with a side hold. And then I 
busted into the house. If I die first I'll write you a letter and tell 
you if it's any worse down there than the inside of that yellow house 
was; but don't believe it yet. I was a heap more cooked than the 
hurry-up orders of broiled chicken that you get in restaurants. The 
fire and smoke had me down on the floor twice, and was about to shame 
Herkimer, but the firemen helped me with their little stream of water, 
and I got to Mrs. Sampson's room. She'd lost conscientiousness from 
the smoke, so I wrapped her in the bed-clothes and got her on my 
shoulder. Well, the floors wasn't as bad as they said, or I never 
could have done it - not by no means.
   I carried her out fifty yards from the house and laid her on the 
grass. Then, of course, every one of them other twenty-two plain-tiffs 
to the lady's hand crowded around with tin dippers of water really to 
save her. And up runs the boy with the flax-seed.
   I unwrapped the covers from Mrs. Sampson's head. She opened her 
eyes and says -
   `Is that you, Mr. Pratt?'
   `S-s-sh,' says I. `Don't talk till you've had the remedy.'
   I runs my arm around her neck and raises her head, gentle, and 
breaks the bag of flax-seed with the other hand; and as easy as I 
could I bends over and slips three or four of the seeds in the outer 
corner of her eye.
   Up gallops the village doc. by this time, and snorts around, and 
grabs at Mrs. Sampson's pulse, and wants to know what I mean by such 
sandblasted nonsense.
   `Well, old Jalap and Jerusalem oak-seed,' says I, `I'm no regular 
practitioner, but I'll show you my authority, anyway.'
   They fetch my coat, and I gets out the Handbook.
   `Look on page 117,' says I, `at the remedy for suffocation by smoke 
or gas. Flax-seed in the outer corner of the eye, it says. I don't 
know whether it works as a smoke consumer or whether it hikes the 
compound gastro-hippopotamus nerve into action, but Herkimer says it, 
and he was called to the case first. If you want to make it a 
consultation there's no objection.'
   Old doc. takes the book and looks at it by means of his specs. and 
a fireman's lantern.
   `Well, Mr. Pratt,' says he, `you evidently got on the wrong line in 
reading your diagnosis. The recipe for suffocation says: `Get the 
patient into fresh air as quickly as possible, and place in a 
reclining position.' The flax-seed remedy is for `Dust and Cinders in 
the Eye,' on the line above. But, after all -'
   `See here,' interrupts Mrs. Sampson, `I reckon I've got some-thing 
to say in this consultation. That flax-seed done me more good than 
anything I ever tried.' And then she raises up her head and lays it 
back on my arm again, and says: `Put some in the other eye, Sandy 
dear.'
   And so if you was to stop off at Rosa to-morrow, or any other day; 
you'd see a fine new yellow house, with Mrs. Pratt, that was Mrs. 
Sampson, embellishing and adorning it. And if you was to step inside 
you'd see on the marble-top centre table in the parlour Herkimer's 
Handbook of Indispeyrsable Information, all re-bound in red morocco, 
and ready to be consulted on any subject pertaining to human happiness 
and wisdom.