Emphasis Preaching Journal

"The Last Leaf" by O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) tells of two women in a Greenwich Village flat and their neighbor, an aging artist named Behrman, who dreams of painting a masterpiece. When one of the women is stricken with pneumonia, she ties her fate to a leaf of ivy visible through the window from her bed. "When the last one goes, I must go, too," she says. But the leaf hangs and she recovers. Only after she has regained her health does she learn that Behrman has painted the leaf, his masterpiece, on the wall facing her window, and that he succumbed to pneumonia from the effort.