Contents:

Page No 1

Page No 2

Page No 3

Page No 4

A Plea For Old Cap Collier ................................................................................................................................1

Irvin S. Cobb ............................................................................................................................................1

For a good many years now I have been carrying this idea round with me. It was more or less of a loose and

unformed idea, and it wouldn't jell. What brought it round to the solidification point was this: Here the other

week, being half sick, I was laid up over Sunday in a small hotel in a small seacoast town. I had read all the

newspapers and all the magazines I could get hold of. The local bookstore, of course, was closed. They won't

let the oysters stay open on Sunday in that town. The only literature my fellow guests seemed interested in

Finally, when despair was about to claim me for her own, I ran across an ancient Fifth Reader, all tattered and

stained and having that smell of age which is common to old books and old sheep. I took it up to bed with

me, and I read it through from cover to cover. Long before I was through the very idea which for so long had

been sloshing round inside of my headthis idea which, as one might say, had been aged in the woodtook

shape. Then and there I decided that the very first chance I had I would sit me down and write a plea for Old

In my youth I was spanked freely and frequently for doing many different things that were forbidden, and

also for doing the same thing many different times and getting caught doing it. That, of course, was before

the Boy Scout movement had come along to show how easily and how sanely a boy's natural restlessness and

a boy's natural love for adventure may be directed into helpful channels; that was when nearly everything a

normal, active boy craved to do was wrong and, therefore, held to be a spankable offense.

This was a general rule in our town. It did not especially apply to any particular household, but it applied

practically to all the households with which I was in any way familiar. It was a community where an

oldfashioned brand of applied theology was most strictly applied. Heaven was a place which went

unanimously Democratic every fall, because all the Republicans had gone elsewhere. Hell was a place full of

redhot coals and clinkered sinners and unbaptized babies and a smell like somebody cooking ham, with a

deputy devil coming in of a morning with an asbestos napkin draped over his arm and flicking a fireproof

cockroach off the table cloth and leaning across the back of Satan's chair and saying: "Good mornin', boss.

How're you going to have your lost souls this mornin'fried on one side or turned over?" Sunday was three

weeks long, and longer than that if it rained. About all a fellow could do after he'd come back from Sunday

school was to sit round with his feet cramped into the shoes and stockings which he never wore on week days

and with the rest of him incased in starchy, uncomfortable dressup clothesjust sit round and sit round and

itch. You couldn't scratch hard either. It was sinful to scratch audibly and with good, broad, free strokes,

which is the only satisfactory way to scratch. In our town they didn't spend Sunday; they kept the Sabbath,

Looking back on my juvenile years it seems to me that, generally speaking, when spanked I deserved it. But

always there were two punishable things against whichbeing disciplinedmy youthful spirit revolted with

a sort of inarticulate sense of injustice. One was for violation of the Sunday code, which struck me as wrong

the code, I mean, not the violationwithout knowing exactly why it was wrong; and the other, repeated

times without number, was when I had been caught reading nickul libruries, erroneously referred to by our

I read them at every chance; so did every normal boy of my acquaintance. We traded lesser treasures for

them; we swapped them on the basis of two old volumes for one new one; we maintained a clandestine

circulatinglibrary system which had its branch offices in every stable loft in our part of town. The more

daring among us read them in school behind the shelter of an open geography propped up on the desk.

Shall you ever forget the horror of the moment when, carried away on the wings of adventure with Nick

Carter or BigFoot Wallace or Frank Reade or bully Old Cap, you forgot to flash occasional glances of

cautious inquiry forward in order to make sure the teacher was where she properly should be, at her desk up

in front, and read on and on until that subtle sixth sense which comes to you when a lot of people begin

staring at you warned you something was amiss, and you looked up and round you and found yourself all

I say cruel advisedly, because up to a certain age children are naturally more cruel than tigers. Civilization

has provided them with tools, as it were, for practicing cruelty, whereas the tiger must rely only on his teeth

and his bare claws. So you looked round, feeling that the shadow of an impending doom encompassed you,

and then you realized that for no telling how long the teacher had been standing just behind you, reading over

And at home were you caught in the act of reading them, orwhat from the parental standpoint was almost

as badin the act of harboring them? I was. Housecleaning times, when they found them hidden under

furniture or tucked away on the back shelves of pantry closets, I was paddled until I had the feelings of a slice

of hot, buttered toast somewhat scorched on the under side. And each time, having been paddled, I was

admonished that boys who read dime novelsonly they weren't dime novels at all but cost uniformly five

cents a copyalways came to a bad end, growing up to be criminals or Republicans or something equally

abhorrent. And I was urged to read books which would help me to shape my career in a proper course. Such

books were put into my hands, and I loathed them. I know now why when I grew up my gorge rose and my

appetite turned against socalled classics. Their style was so much like the style of the books which older

Such were the specious statements advanced by the oldsters. And we had no reply for their argument, or if we

had one could not find the language in which to couch it. Besides there was another and a deeper reason. A

boy, being what he is, the most sensitive and the most secretive of living creatures regarding his innermost

emotions, rarely does bare his real thoughts to his elders, for they, alas, are not young enough to have a

What we might have answered, had we had the verbal facility and had we not feared further painful corporeal

measures for talking backor what was worse, ridiculewas that reading Old Cap Collier never yet sent a

boy to a bad end. I never heard of a boy who ran away from home and really made a go of it who was

actuated at the start by the nickul librury. Burning with a sense of injustice, filled up with the realization that

we were not appreciated at home, we often talked of running away and going out West to fight Indians, but

we never did. I remember once two of us started for the Far West, and got nearly as far as Oak Grove

Cemetery, when the dusk of evening impendingwe decided to turn back and give our parents just one

What, also, we might have pointed out was that in a fivecent story the villain was absolutely sure of

receiving suitable and adequate punishment for his misdeeds. Right then and there, on the spot, he got his.

And the heroine was always so pluperfectly pure. And the hero always was a hero to his finger tips, never

doing anything unmanly or wrong or cowardly, and always using the most respectful language in the

presence of the opposite sex. There was never any sex problem in a nickul librury. There were never any

smutty words or questionable phrases. If a villain said "Curse you!" he was going pretty far. Any one of us

might whet up our natural instincts for cruelty on Fore's Book of Martyrs, or read of all manner of

unmentionable horrors in the Old Testament, but except surreptitiously we couldn't walk with Nick Carter,

whose motives were ever pure and who never used the naughty word even in the passion of the death grapple

We might have told our parents, had we had the words in which to state the case and they but the patience to

listen, that in a nickul librury there was logic and the thrill of swift action and the sharp spice of adventure.

There, invariably virtue was rewarded and villainy confounded; there, inevitably was the final triumph for

law and for justice and for the right; there embalmed in one thin paper volume, was all that Sandford and

Merton lacked; all that the Rollo books never had. We might have told them that though the Leatherstocking

Tales and Robinson Crusoe and Two Years Before the Mast and Ivanhoe were all well enough in their way,

the trouble with them was that they mainly were so longwinded. It took so much time to get to where the

first punch was, whereas Ned Buntline or Col. Prentiss Ingraham would hand you an exciting jolt on the very

You take J. Fenimore Cooper now. He meant well and he had ideas, but his Indians were so everlastingly

slow about getting under way with their scalping operations! Chapter after chapter there was so much

fashionable and difficult language that the plot was smothered. You couldn't see the woods for the trees, But

it was the accidental finding of an ancient and reminiscent volume one Sunday in a little hotel which gave me

the cue to what really made us such confirmed rebels against constituted authority, in a literary way of

speaking. The thing which inspired us with hatred for the socalled juvenile classic was a thing which struck

The basic reason, the underlying motive, lay in the fact that in the schoolbooks of our adolescence, and

notably in the school readers, our young mentalities were fed forcibly on a pap which affronted our

intelligence at the same time that it cloyed our adolescent palates. It was not altogether the lack of action; it

was more the lack of plain common sense in the literary spoon victuals which they ladled into us at school

that caused our youthful souls to revolt. In the final analysis it was this more than any other cause which sent

us up to the haymow for delicious, forbidden hours in the company of Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok.

Midway of the old dogeared reader which I picked up that day I came across a typical example of the sort of

stuff I mean. I hadn't seen it before in twentyfive years; but now, seeing it, I remembered it as clearly almost

as though it had been the week before instead of a quarter of a century before when for the first time it had

been brought to my attention. It was a piece entitled, The Shipwreck, and it began as follows:

In the winter of 1824 Lieutenant G, of the United States Navy, with his beautiful wife and child,

So far so good. At least, here is a direct beginning. A family group is going somewhere. There is an implied

promise that before they have traveled very far something of interest to the reader will happen to them. Sure

enough, the packet runs into a storm and founders. As she is going down Lieutenant G puts his wife

and baby into a lifeboat manned by sailors, and thenthere being no room for him in the lifeboathe

remains behind upon the deck of the sinking vessel, while the lifeboat puts off for shore. A giant wave

overturns the burdened cockleshell and he sees its passengers engulfed in the waters. Up to this point the

chronicle has been what a chronicle should be. Perhaps the phraseology has been a trifle toploftical, and there

are a few words in it long enough to run as serials, yet at any rate we are getting an effect in drama. But bear

The wretched husband saw but too distinctly the destruction of all he held dear. But here alas and forever

were shut off from him all sublunary prospects. He fell upon the deck powerless, senseless, a corpsethe

There's language for you! How different it is from that historic passage when the crack of Little Sure Shot's

rifle rang out and another Redskin bit the dust. Nothing is said there about anybody having his sublunary

prospects shut off; nothing about the Redskin becoming the victim of a sublime sensibility. In fifteen graphic

words and in one sentence Little Sure Shot croaked him, and then with bated breath you moved on to the next

paragraph, sure of finding in it yet more attractive casualties snappily narrated.

No, sir! In the nickul librury the author did not waste his time and yours telling you that an individual on

becoming a corpse would simultaneously become powerless and senseless. He credited your intelligence for

something. For contrast, take the immortal work entitled Deadwood Dick of Deadwood; or, The Picked

Party; by Edward L. Wheeler, a copy of which has just come to my attention again nearly thirty years after

The sun was just kissing the mountain tops that frowned down upon BillyGoat Gulch, and in the aforesaid

mighty seam in the face of mighty Nature the shadows of a Warm June night were gathering rapidly.

The birds had mostly hushed their songs and flown to their nests in the dismal lonely pines, and only the

tuneful twang of a wellplayed banjo aroused the brooding quiet, save it be the shrill, croaking screams of a

crow, perched upon the top of a dead pine, which rose from the nearly perpendicular mountain side that

That, as I recall, was a powerfully long bit of description for a nickul librury, and having got it out of his

system Mr. Wheeler wasted no more valuable space on the scenery. From this point on he gave you

actionaction with reason behind it and logic to it and the guaranty of a proper climax and a satisfactory

conclusion to follow. Deadwood Dick marched many a flowerstrewn mile through my young life, but to the

best of my recollection he never shut off anybody's sublunary prospects. If a party deserved killing

Deadwood just naturally up and killed him, and the historian told about it in graphic yet straightforward terms

of speech; and that was all there was to it, and that was all there should have been to it.

At the risk of being termed an iconoclast and a smasher of the pure high ideals of the olden days, I propose to

undertake to show that practically all of the preposterous asses and the impossible idiots of literature found

their way into the school readers of my generation. With the passage of years there may have been some

reform in this direction, but I dare affirm, without having positive knowledge of the facts, that a majority of

these halfwits still are being featured in the grammargrade literature of the present time. The authors of

school readers, even modern school readers, surely are no smarter than the run of grownups even, say, as

you and as I; and we blindly go on holding up as examples before the eyes of the young of the period the

characters and the acts of certain popular figures of poetry and prose whodid but we give them the acid test

of reasonwould reveal themselves either as incurable idiots, or else as figures in scenes and incidents

You remember, don't you, the schoolbook classic of the noble lad who by reason of his neat dress, and by his

use in the most casual conversation of the sort of language which the late Mr. Henry James used when he was

writing his very Jamesiest, secured a job as a trusted messenger in the large city store or in the city's large

store, if we are going to be purists about it, as the boy in question undoubtedly was?

It seems that he had supported his widowed mother and a large family of brothers and sisters by shoveling

snow and, I think, laying brick or something of that technical nature. After this lapse of years I won't be sure

about the bricklaying, but at any rate, work was slack in his regular line, and so he went to the proprietor of

this vast retail establishment and procured a responsible position on the strength of his easy and graceful

personal address and his employment of some of the most stylish adjectives in the dictionary. At this time he

was nearly seven years oldyes, sir, actually nearly seven. We have the word of the schoolbook for it. We

should have had a second chapter on this boy. Probably at nine he was being considered for president of

Then there was the familiar instance of the Spartan youth who having stolen a fox and hidden it inside his

robe calmly stood up and let the animal gnaw his vitals rather than be caught with it in his possession. But,

why? I ask you, why? What was the good of it all? What object was served? To begin with, the boy had

absconded with somebody else's fox, or with somebody's else fox, which is undoubtedly the way a compiler

of school readers would phrase it. This, right at the beginning, makes the morality of the transaction highly

dubious. In the second place, he showed poor taste. If he was going to swipe something, why should he not

We waive that point, though, and come to the lack of discretion shown by the fox. He starts eating his way

out through the boy, a messy and difficult procedure, when merely by biting an aperture in the tunic he could

have emerged by the front way with ease and dispatch. And what is the final upshot of it all? The boy falls

dead, with a large unsightly gap in the middle of him. Probably, too, he was a boy whose parents were raising

him for their own purposes. As it is, all gnawed up in this fashion and deceased besides, he loses his

attractions for everyone except the undertaker. The fox presumably has an attack of acute indigestion. And

there you are! Compare the moral of this with the moral of any one of the Old Cap Collier series, where

virtue comes into its own and sanity is prevalent throughout and vice gets what it deserves, and all.

In McGuffey's Third Reader, I think it was, occurred that story about the small boy who lived in Holland

among the dikes and dams, and one evening he went across the country to carry a few illustrated post cards or

some equally suitable gift to a poor blind man, and on his way back home in the twilight he discovered a leak

in the sea wall. If he went for help the breach might widen while he was gone and the whole structure give

way, and then the sea would come roaring in, carrying death and destruction and windmills and wooden

shoes and pineapple cheeses on its crest. At least, this is the inference one gathers from reading Mr.

So what does the quickwitted youngster do? He shoves his little arm in the crevice on the inner side, where

already the water is trickling through, thus blocking the leak. All night long he stands there, one small,

halffrozen Dutch boy holding back the entire North Atlantic. Not until centuries later, when Judge Alton B.

Parker runs for president against Colonel Roosevelt and is defeated practically by acclamation is there to be

presented so historic and so magnificent an example of a contest against tremendous odds. In the morning a

peasant, going out to mow the tulip beds, finds the little fellow crouched at the foot of the dike and inquires

what ails him. The lad, raising his weary headbut wait, I shall quote the exact language of the book:

Simple? I'll say it is! Positively nothing could be simpler unless it be the stark simplicity of the mind of an

author who figures that when the Atlantic Ocean starts boring its way through a crack in a sea wall you can

stop it by plugging the hole on the inner side of the sea wall with a small boy's arm. Ned Buntline may never

have enjoyed the vogue among parents and teachers that Mr. McGuffey enjoyed, but I'll say this for himhe

And there was Peter Hurdle, the ragged lad who engaged in a long but tiresome conversation with the

philanthropic and inquisitive Mr. Lenox, during the course of which it developed that Peter didn't want

anything. When it came on to storm he got under a tree. When he was hungry he ate a raw turnip. Raw

turnips, it would appear, grew all the year round in the fields of the favored land where Peter resided. If the

chill winds of autumn blew in through one of the holes in Peter's trousers they blew right out again through

another hole. And he didn't care to accept the dime which Mr. Lenox in an excess of generosity offered him,

because, it seemed, he already had a dime. When it came to being plumb contented there probably never was

a soul on this earth that was the equal of Master Hurdle. He even was satisfied with his name which I would

Likewise, there was the case of Hugh Idle and Mr. Toil. Perhaps you recall that moving story? Hugh tries to

dodge work; wherever he goes he finds Mr. Toil in one guise or another but always with the same harsh voice

and the same frowning eyes, bossing some job in a manner which would cost him his bossship right off the

reel in these times when union labor is so touchy. And what is the moral to be drawn from this narrative? I

know that all my life I have been trying to get away from work, feeling that I was intended for leisure, though

never finding time somehow to take it up seriously. But what was the use of trying to discourage me from

In Harper's Fourth Reader, edition of 1888, I found an article entitled The Difference Between the Plants and

Animals. It takes up several pages and includes some of the fanciest language the senior Mr. Harper could

disinter from the Unabridged. In my own caseand I think I was no more observant than the average urchin

of my ageI can scarcely remember a time when I could not readily determine certain basic distinctions

between such plants and such animals as a child is likely to encounter in the temperate parts of North

While emerging from infancy some of my contemporaries may have fallen into the error of the little boy who

came into the house with a haunted look in his eye and asked his mother if mulberries had six legs apiece and

ran round in the dust of the road, and when she told him that such was not the case with mulberries he said:

To the best of my recollection, I never made this mistake, or at least if I did I am sure I made no inquiry

afterward which might tend further to increase my doubts; and in any event I am sure that by the time I was

old enough to stumble over Mr. Harper's favorite big words I was old enough to tell the difference between

an ordinary animalsay, a house catand any one of the commoner forms of plant life, such as, for

example, the scalybark hickory tree, practically at a glance. I'll add this too: Nick Carter never wasted any

of the golden moments which he and I spent together in elucidating for me the radical points of difference

In the range of poetry selected by the compilers of the readers for my especial benefit as I progressed onward

from the primary class into the grammar grades I find on examination of these earlier American authorities an

even greater array of chuckleheads than appear in the prose divisions. I shall pass over the celebrated

instanceas read by us in class in a loud tone of voice and without halt for inflection or the taking of

breathof the Turk who at midnight in his guarded tent was dreaming of the hour when Greece her knees in

suppliance bent would tremble at his power. I remember how vaguely I used to wonder who it was that was

going to grease her knees and why she should feel called upon to have them greased at all. Also, I shall pass

over the instance of Abou Ben Adhem, whose name led all the rest in the golden book in which the angel was

writing. Why shouldn't it have led all the rest? A man whose front name begins with Ab, whose middle initial

is B, and whose last name begins with Ad will be found leading all the rest in any city directory or any

telephone list anywhere. Alphabetically organized as he was, Mr. Adhem just naturally had to lead; and yet

for hours on end my teaches consumed her energies and mine in a more or less unsuccessful effort to cause

In three separate schoolbooks, each the work of a different compilator, I discover Sir Walter Scott's poetic

contribution touching on Young LochinvarYoung Lochinvar who came out of the West, the same as the

Plumb plan subsequently came, and the Hiram Johnson presidential boom and the initiative and the

referendum and the I. W. W. Even in those ancient times the West appears to have been a favorite place for

upsetting things to come from; so I can't take issue with Sir Walter there. But I do take issue with him where

So light to the croupe the fair lady he swung, So light to the saddle before her he sprung!

Even in childhood's hour I am sure I must have questioned the ability of Young Lochinvar to perform this

achievement, for I was born and brought up in a horsebackriding country. Now in the light of yet fuller

experience I wish Sir Walter were alive today so I might argue the question out with him.

Let us consider the statement on its physical merits solely. Here we have Young Lochinvar swinging the lady

to the croupe, and then he springs to the saddle in front of her. Now to do this he must either take a long

running start and leapfrog clear over the lady's head as she sits there, and land accurately in the saddle, which

is scarcely a proper thing to do to any lady, aside from the difficulty of springing ten or fifteen feet into the

air and coming down, crotched out, on a given spot, or else he must contribute a feat in contortion the like of

To be brutally frank about it, the thing just naturally is not possible. I don't care if Young Lochinvar was as

limber as a yard of fresh tripeand he certainly did shake a lithesome calf in the measures of the dance if Sir

Walter, in an earlier stanza, is to be credited with veracity. Even so, I deny that he could have done that

croupe trick. There isn't a croupier at Monte Carlo who could have done it. Buffalo Bill couldn't have done it.

Ned Buntline wouldn't have had Buffalo Bill trying to do it. Doug Fairbanks couldn't do it. I couldn't do it

Skipping over Robert Southey's tiresome redundancy in spending so much of his time and mine, when I was

in the Fifth Reader stage, in telling how the waters came down at Ladore when it was a petrified cinch that

they, being waters, would have to come down, anyhow, I would next direct your attention to two of the

foremost idiots in all the realm of poesy; one a young idiot and one an older idiot, probably with whiskers,

but both embalmed in verse, and both, mind you, stuck into every orthodox reader to be glorified before the

eyes of childhood. I refer to that juvenile champion among idiots, the boy who stood on the burning deck, and

to the ship's captain in the poem called The Tempest. Let us briefly consider the given facts as regards the

latter: It was winter and it was midnight and a storm was on the deep, and the passengers were huddled in the

cabin and not a soul would dare to sleep, and they were shuddering there in silenceone gathers the silence

was so deep you could hear them shudderingand the stoutest held his breath, which is considerable feat, as

I can testify, because the stouter a fellow gets the harder it is for him to hold his breath for any considerable

period of time. Very well, then, this is the condition of affairs. If ever there was a time when those in

authority should avoid spreading alarm this was the time. By all the traditions of the maritime service it

devolved upon the skipper to remain calm, cool and collected. But what does the poet reveal to a lot of

He didn't whisper it; he didn't tell it to a friend in confidence; he bellowed it out at the top of his voice so all

the passengers could hear him. The only possible excuse which can be offered for that captain's behavior is

that his staggering was due not to the motion of the ship but to alcoholic stimulant. Could you imagine Little

Sure Shot, the Terror of the Pawnees, drunk or sober, doing an asinine thing like that? Not in ten thousand

years, you couldn't. But then we must remember that Little Sure Shot, being a moral dimenovel hero, never

The boy who stood on the burning deck has been played up as an example of youthful heroism for the benefit

of the young of our race ever since Mrs. Felicia Dorothea Hemans set him down in black and white. I deny

that he was heroic. I insist that he merely was feebleminded. Let us give this youth the careful onceover:

The scene is the Battle of the Nile. The time is August, 1798. When the action of the piece begins the boy

stands on the burning deck whence all but him had fled. You see, everyone else aboard had had sense enough

to beat it, but he stuck because his father had posted him there. There was no good purpose he might serve by

sticking, except to furnish added material for the poetess, but like the leatherheaded young imbecile that he

was he stood there with his feet getting warmer all the time, while the flame that lit the battle's wreck shone

There came a burst of thunder sound; The boyoh! where was he? Ask of the winds, that far around With

Ask the waves. Ask the fragments. Ask Mrs. Hemans. Or, to save time, inquire of me.

He has become totally extinct. He is no more and he never was very much. Still we need not worry. Mentally

he must have been from the very outset a liability rather than an asset. Had he lived, undoubtedly he would

have wound up in a home for the feebleminded. It is better so, as it isbetter that he should be spread about

over the surface of the ocean in a broad general way, thus saving all the expense and trouble of gathering him

up and burying him and putting a tombstone over him. He was one of the incurables.

Once upon a time, writing a little piece on another subject, I advanced the claim that the champion halfwit

of all poetic anthology was Sweet Alice, who, as described by Mr. English, wept with delight when you gave

her a smile, and trembled in fear at your frown. This of course was long before Prohibition came in. These

times there are many ready to weep with delight when you offer to give them a smile; but in Mr. English's

time and Alice's there were plenty of saloons handy. I remarked, what an awful killjoy Alice must have

been, weeping in a disconcerting manner when somebody smiled in her direction and trembling violently

But when I gave Alice first place in the list I acted too hastily. Second thought should have informed me that

undeniably the post of honor belonged to the central figure of Mr. Henry W. Longfellow's poem, Excelsior. I

ran across itExcelsior, I meanin three different readers the other day when I was compiling some of the

data for this treatise. Naturally it would be featured in all three. It wouldn't do to leave Mr. Longfellow's hero

out of a volume in which space was given to such lesser village idiots as Casabianca and the Spartan youth.

The shades of night were falling fast, As through an Alpine village passed A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and

There we get an accurate pen picture of his young man's deplorable state. He is climbing a mountain in the

dead of winter. It is made plain later on that he is a stranger in the neighborhood, consequently it is fair to

assume that the mountain in question is one he has never climbed before. Nobody hired him to climb any

mountain; he isn't climbing it on a bet or because somebody dared him to climb one. He is not dressed for

mountain climbing. Apparently he is wearing the costume in which he escaped from the institution where he

had been an inmatea costume consisting simply of low stockings, sandals and a kind of flowing woolen

nightshirt, cut short to begin with and badly shrunken in the wash. He has on no rubber boots, no sweater, not

even a pair of ear muffs. He also is bareheaded. Well, any time the wearing of hats went out of fashion he

I grant you that in the poem Mr. Longfellow does not go into details regarding the patient's garb. I am going

by the illustration in the reader. The original Mr. McGuffey was very strong for illustrations. He stuck them

in everywhere in his readers, whether they matched the themes or not. Being as fond of pictures as he

undoubtedly was, it seems almost a pity he did not marry the tattooed lady in a circus and then when he got

tired of studying her pictorially on one side he could ask her to turn around and let him see what she had to

say on the other side. Perhaps he did. I never gleaned much regarding the family history of the McGuffeys.

Be that as it may, the wardrobe is entirely unsuited for the rigors of the climate in Switzerland in winter time.

Symptomatically it marks the wearer as a person who is mentally lacking. He needs a keeper almost as badly

as he needs some heavy underwear. But this isn't the worst of it. Take the banner. It bears the single word

"Excelsior." The youth is going through a strange town late in the evening in his nightie, and it winter time,

carrying a banner advertising a shredded woodfiber commodity which won't be invented until a hundred and

His brow was sad; his eyes beneath Flashed like a falchion from its sheath, And like a silver clarion rung The

Get it, don't you? Even his features fail to jibe. His brow is corrugated with grief, but the flashing of the eye

denotes a lack of intellectual coherence which any alienist would diagnose at a glance as evidence of total

dementia, even were not confirmatory proof offered by his action in huckstering for a product which doesn't

exist, in a language which no one present can understand. The most delirious typhoid fever patient you ever

In happy homes he saw the light Of household fires gleam warm and bright; Above, the spectral glaciers

The last line gives him away still more completely. He is groaning now, where a moment before he was

clarioning. A bit later, with one of those shifts characteristic of the mentally unbalanced, his mood changes

"Try not the Pass," the old man said; "Dark lowers the tempest overhead, The roaring torrent is deep and

"Oh stay," the maiden said, and rest Thy weary head upon this breast!" A tear stood in his bright blue eye,

"Beware the pinetree's withered branch! Beware the awful avalanche!" This was the peasant's last Good

These three verses round out the picture. The venerable citizen warns him against the Pass; pass privileges up

that mountain have all been suspended. A kindhearted maiden tenders hospitalities of a most generous

nature, considering that she never saw the young man before. Some people might even go so far as to say that

she should have been ashamed of herself; others, that Mr. Longfellow, in giving her away, was guilty of an

indelicacy, to say the least of it. Possibly she was practicing up to qualify for membership on the reception

committee the next time the visiting firemen came to her town or when there was going to be an Elks'

reunion; so I for one shall not question her motives. She was hospitablelet it go at that. The peasant

couples with his goodnight message a reference to the danger of falling pine wood and also avalanches,

which have never been pleasant things to meet up with when one is traveling on a mountain in an opposite

All about him firelights are gleaming, happy families are gathered before the hearthstone, and through the

windows the evening yodel may be heard percolating pleasantly. There is every inducement for the youth to

drop in and rest his poor, tired, foolish face and hands and thaw out his knee joints and give the maiden a

chance to make good on that proposition of hers. But no, high up above timber line he has an engagement

with himself and Mr. Longfellow to be frozen as stiff as a dried herring; and so, now groaning, now with his

eye flashing, now with a tearundoubtedly a frozen tearstanding in the eye, now clarioning, now sighing,

At break of day, as heavenward The pious monks of Saint Bernard Uttered the oftrepeated prayer, A voice

I'll say this much for him: He certainly is hard to kill. He can stay out all night in those clothes, with the

thermometer below zero, and at dawn still be able to chirp the only word that is left in his vocabulary. He

can't last forever though. There has to be a finish to this lamentable fiasco sometime. We get it:

A traveler, by the faithful hound, Half buried in the snow was found, Still grasping in his hand of ice That

There in the twilight cold and gray, Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay, And from the sky serene and far, A voice

The meteoric voice said "Excelsior!" It should have said "Bonehead!" It would have said it, too, if Ned

Buntline had been handling the subject, for he had a sense of verities, had Ned. Probably that was one of the

With the passage of years I rather imagine that Lieutenant G, of the United States Navy, who went to

so much trouble and took so many needless pains in order to become a corpse may have vanished from the

school readers. I admit I failed to find him in any of the modern editions through which I glanced, but I am

able to report, as a result of my researches, that the wellknown croupe specialist, Young Lochinvar, is still

there and so likewise is Casabianca, the total loss; and as I said before, I ran across Excelsior three times.

Just here the other day, when I was preparing the material for this little book, I happened upon an

advertisement in a New York paper of an auction sale of a collection of socalled dime novels, dating back to

the old Beadle's Boy's Library in the early eighties and coming on down through the years into the generation

when Nick and Old Cap were succeeding some of the earlier favorites. I read off a few of the leading titles

Bronze Jack, the California Thoroughbred; or, The Lost City of the Basaltic Buttes. A strange story of a

desperate adventure after fortune in the weird, wild Apache land. By Albert W. Aiken.

Tombstone Dick, the Train Pilot; or, The Traitor's Trail. A story of the Arizona Wilds. By Ned Buntline.

The Tarantula of Taos; or, Giant George's Revenge. A tale of Sardinebox City, Arizona. By Major Sam S.

Redtop Rube, the Vigilante Prince; or, The Black Regulators of Arizona. By Major E. L. St. Vrain.

Adventures of Wild Bill, the Pistol Prince, from Youth to his Death by Assassination. Deeds of Daring,

Adventure and Thrilling Incidents in the Life of J. B. Hickok, known to the World as Wild Bill.

These titles and many another did I read, and reading them my mind slid back along a groove in my brain to a

certain stable loft in a certain Kentucky town, and I said to myself that if I had a boysay, about twelve or

fourteen years oldI would go to this auction and bid in these books and I would back them up and

reenforce them with some of the best of the collected works of Nick Carter and Cap Collier and Nick Carter,

Jr., and Frank Reade, and I would buy, if I could find it anywhere, a certain paperbacked volume dealing

with the life of the James boysnot Henry and William, but Jesse and Frankwhich I read ever so long

ago; and I would confer the whole lot of them upon that offspring of mine and I would say to him:

"Here, my son, is something for you; a rare and precious gift. Read these volumes openly. Never mind the

crude style in which most of them are written. It can't be any worse than the stilted and artificial style in

which your school reader is written; and, anyhow, if you are ever going to be a writer, style is a thing which

you laboriously must learn, and then having acquired added wisdom you will forget part of it and chuck the

rest of it out of the window and acquire a style of your own, which merely is another way of saying that if

you have good taste to start with you will have what is called style in writing, and if you haven't that sense of

"Read them for the thrills that are in them. Read them, remembering that if this country had not had a pioneer

breed of Buckskin Sams and Deadwood Dicks we should have had no native school of dime novelists. Read

them for their brisk and stirring movement; for the spirit of outdoor adventure and life which crowds them;

for their swift but logical processions of sequences; for the phases of pioneer Americanism they rawly but

graphically portray, and for their moral values. Read them along with your Coopers and your Ivanhoe and

your Mayne Reids. Read them through, and perhaps some day, if fortune is kinder to you than ever it was to

your father, with a background behind you and a vision before you, you may be inspired to sit down and

write a dime novel of your own almost good enough to be worthy of mention in the same breath with the two

greatest adventure storiesdollarsized dime novels is what they really arethat ever were written; written,

both of them, by sureenough writing men, who, I'm sure, must have based their moods and their modes

upon the memories of the dime novels which they, they in their turn, read when they were boys of your age.

"I refer, my son, to a book called Huckleberry Finn, and to a book called Treasure Island."