A Christmas Pi by O. Henry — Read

I am not without claim to distinction. Although I still stick to suspenders -- which, happily, reciprocate -- I am negatively egregious. I have never, for instance, seen a professional baseball game, never said that George M. Cohan was "clever," never started to keep a diary, never called Eugene Walter by his first name, never parodied "The Raven," never written a Christmas story, never -- but what denizen of Never-Never Land can boast so much? Or would, I overhear you think, if he could?

Always have I been on the lookout for the Impossible, always on the trail of the Unattainable. Someday, perhaps, I shall find a sleeping-car with a name that means something, an intelligent West Indian hallboy in a New York apartment building, a boardinghouse whose inmates occasionally smile, a man born in Manhattan, a 60-cent table d'hôte that serves six oysters the portion instead of four, a Southerner who leaves you in doubt as to his birthplace longer than ten minutes after the introduction, and myself writing a Christmas story. But that will happen ten days after the millennium, and as the millennium is to be magazineless --