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O. Henry"You can tell your paper," the great man said, "I refused an interview. I have nothing to say on the question, sir; Nothing to say to you."
And then he talked till the sun went down And the chickens went to roost; And he seized the collar of the poor young man, And never his hold he loosed.
And the sun went down and the moon came up, And he talked till the dawn of day; Though he said, "On this subject mentioned by you I have nothing whatever to say."
And down the reporter dropped to sleep And flat on the floor he lay; And the last he heard was the great man's words, "I have nothing at all to say."
- O. Henry O. Henry, pen name of William Sydney Porter. 1862-1910. American short-story writer, noted for his extremely popular stories dealing chiefly with the lives of modest people in great cities, marked by sentimentality, semi-realism, and a surprise ending. The Gift of the Magi is his most famous single story. O. Henry had a contract with the New York World to produce a story a week at the rate of $100 a story. In his early career he was a newspaperman and bank-clerk, and served a prison term in Ohio (1898-1901) for embezzlement, although it is said that inefficient methods in use by the bank were responsible for the shortages of funds for which he was blamed.
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