O. Henry. The Voice of the City

O. Henry was the pen name of the American writer William Sydney Porter (September 11, 1862 – June 5, 1910). O. Henry's short stories are well known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings.
"Twenty-five years ago the school children used
to chant their lessons. The manner of their delivery
was a singsong recitative between the utterance of an
Episcopal minister and the drone of a tired sawmill.
I mean no disrespect. We must have lumber and
sawdust.
I remember one beautiful and instructive little
lyric that emanated from the physiology class. The
most striking line of it was this:
"The shin-bone is the long-est bone in the hu-man
bod-y."
What an inestimable boon it would have been if
all the corporeal and spiritual facts pertaining to
man bad thus been tunefully and logically inculcated
in our youthful minds! But what we gained in
anatomy, music and philosophy was meagre."