“[Stuffy] Pete was not hungry. He had just come from a
feast that had left him of his powers barely those of respiration and
locomotion. His eyes were like two pale gooseberries firmly imbedded in a
swollen and gravy-smeared mask of putty. His breath came in short wheezes; a
senatorial roll of adipose tissue denied a fashionable set to his upturned coat
collar. Buttons that had been sewed upon his clothes by kind Salvation fingers
a week before flew like popcorn, strewing the earth around him. Ragged he was,
with a split shirt front open to the wishbone; but the November breeze,
carrying fine snowflakes, brought him only a grateful coolness. For Stuffy Pete
was overcharged with the caloric produced by a super-bountiful dinner,
beginning with oysters and ending with plum pudding, and including (it seemed
to him) all the roast turkey and baked potatoes and chicken salad and squash
pie and ice cream in the world. Wherefore he sat, gorged, and gazed upon the
world with after-dinner contempt.”—William Sidney Porter, aka O. Henry
(1862-1910), “Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen,” in
The Trimmed Lamp and Other Stories of the Four Million (1907)
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