One Thousand Dollars (short story)

O. Henry's short story “One Thousand Dollars” opens with a brief and polite conversation between a young man and a lawyer. The lawyer offers the young man one thousand dollars, his apparent inheritance from a recently deceased uncle. “Young Gillian,” the young man in question, chuckles at the peculiar and specific amount of his inheritance. He marvels that, had his uncle bestowed a much larger or a much smaller amount of money upon him, he would better understand the bequest. As it stands, however, he is puzzled and stunned by the legacy of one thousand dollars exactly.