SEARCH
Many times in life, we are asked to answer puzzling riddles and questions. Yet, as O. Henry shows in his short story “A Bird of Bagdad,” most of life’s riddles aren’t complicated; we make them so.
A Simple Life
Margrave August Michael von Paulsen Quigg owns a small restaurant in New York and lives a pretty simple life, though full of adventures. By day, he runs his restaurant and, by night, he goes about, searching for “the odd, the mysterious, the inexplicable, the recondite.”
One evening, after closing up his restaurant, Quigg sets out through the dark New York streets with a pocket full of coupons for his restaurant. Ready to find the unexpected, he soon stumbles upon it in the form of a large crowd gathering at a street corner. In the middle of this boisterous, excited crowd sits a young man throwing silver coins into the street with a distracted, dejected air.
The people around him grow excited every time he throws money into the street for a chance at a silver coin. The traffic is held up because of this scene, and a policeman half-heartedly tries to remove the crowd, while grabbing some of the silver coins himself.
Quigg pities the poor young man’s oblivion and sees a specimen who is “food for his hunger after knowledge concerning abnormal working of the human heart.” Quigg makes his way through the crowd, grabs the young man’s arm, and leads him away, while the young man mutters: “Pinched by a painless dentist. … Some lay eggs and some lay none. When is a hen?”
Quigg successfully conveys the young man, Simmons, to a bench, where he kindly questions him and learns why he had been casting silver coins upon the ground. At first, Simmons merely mutters some more nonsense in reply.
A Ridiculous Riddle
Quigg then passionately urges Simmons to confide in him, for he is trustworthy and willing to help. He asks to hear his story.
Softened, Simmons confesses that he has no hope of winning his love. He works for a harness maker, Hildebrandt, with another young man, Bill Watson. Both he and Bill love Hildebrandt’s daughter, Laura, who is the picture of beauty.
Unfortunately, to have a chance at winning Laura’s heart, they must be invited to Hildebrandt’s house. And, if they want to be invited, they must answer Hildebrandt’s ridiculous riddle: “What kind of a hen lays the longest?”
Despairing, Simmons tells Quigg that, if he wants to help him, he will solve the riddle. Quigg paces up and down, but, no matter how much he puzzles his brain, he cannot solve it. At a loss, Quigg hands Simmons a coupon to his restaurant and leaves.
The next day, Simmons heads to work and finds Hildebrandt and his ridiculous riddle waiting for him. When Hildebrandt asks him to produce his answer, Simmons discovers Quigg’s coupon in his pocket, and there he finds the simple solution.
Through this story, Henry shows that even the most impossible riddles often require simple thinking. For Simmons needlessly wracks his brains to solve Hildebrandt’s rather simple riddle.
Henry seems to say, as Henry David Thoreau says in “Walden and Other Writings”: “Our life is frittered away by detail. … Simplify, simplify.” Thus, rather than crowding our lives with extensive details through overthinking, we must simplify.
All we have to do is be willing to wipe away complexity and accept simplicity in all its forms. For simplicity wipes away the extraneous dust to reveal the plain truth hidden underneath.
What arts and culture topics would you like us to cover? Please email ideas or feedback to features@epochtimes.nyc
