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O. Henry Encore

Chapter 42: Topical Verse
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About This Book

A curated collection of short stories, newspaper sketches, and occasional poems from the author’s periodical writings, drawn from regional and urban material. The pieces range from brief humorous vignettes and satirical barbs to quietly melancholic or ironic tales, many built around everyday scenes and local color. Concise narration, vivid small details, and economical wit shape stories that alternate between comedy and pathos, while the included newspaper verse and sketches provide topical commentary and light entertainment alongside the fiction.

Topical Verse

(Dramatis Personae: One singer, one baritone horn, one bass drum.)

There was a man in our town,
And he was very lazy;
He made his wife do everything,
Till she was almost crazy.
Although he was a Christian man,
He made her come upstairs
And wake him up to say “Amen!”
When she had said his prayers.

One night before he went to sleep
He made her kneel and pray
And when she finished, wake him up;
Then this good man did say:
“Oh, Lord, please answer my wife’s prayer.”
And then to sleep he fell.
The Lord did, and the man awoke
To find himself in ———.
Baritone horns “Ta-ta-rum.”
Bass Drums “Boom.”

(Houston Daily Post, Sunday morning, May 17, 1896.)