Short Fiction by O. Henry (librera reader txt) 📕

tell you the proportion of water and muscle-making properties of peas and veal, the shortest verse in the Bible, the number of pounds of shingle nails required to fasten 256 shingles laid four inches to the weather, the population of Kankakee, Ill., the theories of Spinoza, the name of Mr. H. McKay Twombly’s second hall footman, the length of the Hoosac Tunnel, the best time to set a hen, the salary of the railway post-office messenger between Driftwood and Red Bank Furnace, Pa., and the number of bones in the foreleg of a cat.

The weight of learning was no handicap to Dabster. His statistics were the sprigs of parsley with which he garnished the feast of small talk that he would set before you if he conceived that to be your taste. And again he used them as breastworks in foraging at the boardinghouse. Firing at you a volley of figures concerning the weight of a lineal foot of bar-iron 5 × 2¾ inches, and the average annual rainfall at Fort Snelling, Minn., he would transfix with his fork the best piece of chicken on the dish while you were trying to rally sufficiently to ask him weakly why does a hen cross the road.

Thus, brightly armed, and further equipped with a measure of good looks, of a hair-oily, shopping-district-at-three-in-the-afternoon kind, it seems that Joe, of the Lilliputian emporium, had a rival worthy of his steel. But Joe carried no steel. There wouldn’t have been room in his store to draw it if he had.

One Saturday afternoon, about four o’clock, Daisy and Mr. Dabster stopped before Joe’s booth. Dabster wore a silk hat, and⁠—well, Daisy was a woman, and that hat had no chance to get back in its box until Joe had seen it. A stick of pineapple chewing gum was the ostensible object of the call. Joe supplied it through the open side of his store. He did not pale or falter at sight of the hat.

“Mr. Dabster’s going to take me on top of the building to observe the view,” said Daisy, after she had introduced her admirers. “I never was on a skyscraper. I guess it must be awfully nice and funny up there.”

“H’m!” said Joe.

“The panorama,” said Mr. Dabster, “exposed to the gaze from the top of a lofty building is not only sublime, but instructive. Miss Daisy has a decided pleasure in store for her.”

“It’s windy up there, too, as well as here,” said Joe. “Are you dressed warm enough, Daise?”

“Sure thing! I’m all lined,” said Daisy, smiling slyly at his clouded brow. “You look just like a mummy in a case, Joe. Ain’t you just put in an invoice of a pint of peanuts or another apple? Your stock looks awful overstocked.”

Daisy giggled at her favorite joke; and Joe had to smile with her.

“Your quarters are somewhat limited, Mr.⁠—er⁠—er,” remarked Dabster, “in comparison with the size of this building. I understand the area of its side to be about 340 by 100 feet. That would make you occupy a proportionate space as if half of Beloochistan were placed upon a territory as large as the United States east of the Rocky Mountains, with the Province of Ontario and Belgium added.”

“Is that so, sport?” said Joe, genially. “You are Weisenheimer on figures, all right. How many square pounds of baled hay do you think a jackass could eat if he stopped brayin’ long enough to keep still a minute and five eighths?”

A few minutes later Daisy and Mr. Dabster stepped from an elevator to the top floor of the skyscraper. Then up a short, steep stairway and out upon the roof. Dabster led her to the parapet so she could look down at the black dots moving in the street below.

“What are they?” she asked, trembling. She had never been on a height like this before.

And then Dabster must needs play the philosopher on the tower, and conduct her soul forth to meet the immensity of space.

“Bipeds,” he said, solemnly. “See what they become even at the small elevation of 340 feet⁠—mere crawling insects going to and fro at random.”

“Oh, they ain’t anything of the kind,” exclaimed Daisy, suddenly⁠—“they’re folks! I saw an automobile. Oh, gee! are we that high up?”

“Walk over this way,” said Dabster.

He showed her the great city lying like an orderly array of toys far below, starred here and there, early as it was, by the first beacon lights of the winter afternoon. And then the bay and sea to the south and east vanishing mysteriously into the sky.

“I don’t like it,” declared Daisy, with troubled blue eyes. “Say we go down.”

But the philosopher was not to be denied his opportunity. He would let her behold the grandeur of his mind, the half-nelson he had on the infinite, and the memory he had for statistics. And then she would nevermore be content to buy chewing gum at the smallest store in New York. And so he began to prate of the smallness of human affairs, and how that even so slight a removal from earth made man and his works look like one tenth part of a dollar thrice computed. And that one should consider the sidereal system and the maxims of Epictetus and be comforted.

“You don’t carry me with you,” said Daisy. “Say, I think it’s awful to be up so high that folks look like fleas. One of them we saw might have been Joe. Why, Jiminy! we might as well be in New Jersey! Say, I’m afraid up here!”

The philosopher smiled fatuously.

“The earth,” said he, “is itself only as a grain of wheat in space. Look up there.”

Daisy gazed upward apprehensively. The short day was spent and the stars were coming out above.

“Yonder star,” said Dabster, “is Venus, the evening star. She is 66,000,000 miles from the sun.”

“Fudge!” said Daisy, with a brief flash of spirit, “where do you think I come from⁠—Brooklyn? Susie Price, in our store⁠—her brother sent her a ticket to go to San Francisco⁠—that’s only three thousand