A PLEA FOR OLD CAP COLLIER

By Irvin S. Cobb

To Will H. Hogg, Esquire

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 theother week, being half sick, I was laid up over Sunday in a small hotelin a small seacoast town. I had read all the newspapers and all themagazines I could get hold of. The local bookstore, of course, wasclosed. They won't let the oysters stay open on Sunday in that town. Theonly literature my fellow guests seemed interested in was mailorder tabsand price currents. 

Finally, when despair was about to claim me for her own, I ran across anancient Fifth Reader, all tattered and stained and having that smell ofage which is common to old books and old sheep. I took it up to bed withme, and I read it through from cover to cover. Long before I was throughthe very idea which for so long had been sloshing round inside of myhead--this idea which, as one might say, had been aged in the wood--tookshape. Then and there I decided that the very first chance I had I wouldsit me down and write a plea for Old Cap Collier. 

In my youth I was spanked freely and frequently for doing many differentthings that were forbidden, and also for doing the same thing manydifferent times and getting caught doing it. That, of course, was beforethe Boy Scout movement had come along to show how easily and how sanelya boy's natural restlessness and a boy's natural love for adventure maybe directed into helpful channels; that was when nearly everything anormal, active boy craved to do was wrong and, therefore, held to be aspankable offense. 

This was a general rule in our town. It did not especially apply to anyparticular household, but it applied practically to all the householdswith which I was in any way familiar. It was a community where anold-fashioned brand of applied theology was most strictly applied. Heaven was a place which went unanimously Democratic every fall, becauseall the Republicans had gone elsewhere. Hell was a place full of red-hotcoals and clinkered sinners and unbaptized babies and a smell likesomebody cooking ham, with a deputy devil coming in of a morning with anasbestos napkin draped over his arm and flicking a fireproof cockroachoff the table cloth and leaning across the back of Satan's chair andsaying: "Good mornin', boss. How're you going to have your lost soulsthis mornin'--fried on one side or turned over?" Sunday was three weekslong, and longer than that if it rained. About all a fellow could doafter he'd come back from Sunday school was to sit round with his feetcramped into the shoes and stockings which he never wore on week daysand with the rest of him incased in starchy, uncomfortable dress-upclothes--just sit round and sit round and itch. You couldn't scratchhard either. It was sinful to scratch audibly and with good, broad, freestrokes, which is the only satisfactory way to scratch. In our town theydidn't spend Sunday; they kept the Sabbath, which is a very differentthing. 

Looking back on my juvenile years it seems to me that, generallyspeaking, when spanked I deserved it. But always there were twopunishable things against which--being disciplined--my youthful spiritrevolted with a sort of inarticulate sense of injustice. One was forviolation of the Sunday code, which struck me as wrong--the code, Imean, not the violation--without knowing exactly why it was wrong; andthe other, repeated times without number, was when I had been caughtreading nickul libruries, erroneously referred to by our elders as dimenovels. 

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 oftwo old volumes for one new one; we maintained a clandestinecirculating-library system which had its branch offices in every stableloft in our part of town. The more daring among us read them in schoolbehind the shelter of an open geography propped up on the desk. 

Shall you ever forget the horror of the moment when, carried away on thewings of adventure with Nick Carter or Big-Foot Wallace or Frank Readeor bully Old Cap, you forgot to flash occasional glances of cautiousinquiry forward in order to make sure the teacher was where she properlyshould be, at her desk up in front, and read on and on until that subtlesixth sense which comes to you when a lot of people begin staring atyou warned you something was amiss, and you looked up and round you andfound yourself all surrounded by a ring of cruel, gloating eyes?

I say cruel advisedly, because up to a certain age children arenaturally more cruel than tigers. Civilization has provided them withtools, as it were, for practicing cruelty, whereas the tiger must relyonly on his teeth and his bare claws. So you looked round, feeling thatthe shadow of an impending doom encompassed you, and then you realizedthat for no telling how long the teacher had been standing just behindyou, reading over your shoulder. 

And at home were you caught in the act of reading them, or--what fromthe parental standpoint was almost as bad--in the act of harboring them?I was. Housecleaning times, when they found them hidden under furnitureor tucked away on the back shelves of pantry closets, I was paddleduntil I had the feelings of a slice of hot, buttered toast somewhatscorched on the under side. And each time, having been paddled, I wasadmonished that boys who read dime novels--only they weren't dime novelsat all but cost uniformly five cents a copy--always came to a badend, growing up to be criminals or Republicans or something equallyabhorrent. And I was urged to read books which would help me to shapemy career in a proper course. Such books were put into my hands, andI loathed them. I know now why when I grew up my gorge rose and myappetite turned against so-called classics. Their style was so much likethe style of the books which older people wanted me to read when I wasin my early teens. 

Such were the specious statements advanced by the oldsters. And wehad no reply for their argument, or if we had one could not find thelanguage in which to couch it. Besides there was another and a deeperreason. A boy, being what he is, the most sensitive and the mostsecretive of living creatures regarding his innermost emotions, rarelydoes bare his real thoughts to his elders, for they, alas, are not youngenough to have a fellow feeling, and they are too old and they know toomuch to be really wise. 

What we might have answered, had we had the verbal facility and had wenot feared further painful corporeal measures for talking back--or whatwas worse, ridicule--was that reading Old Cap Collier never yet senta boy to a bad end. I never heard of a boy who ran away from home andreally made a go of it who was actuated at the start by the nickullibrury. Burning with a sense of injustice, filled up with therealization that we were not appreciated at home, we often talked ofrunning away and going out West to fight Indians, but we never did. Iremember once two of us started for the Far West, and got nearly as faras Oak Grove Cemetery, when--the dusk of evening impending--we decidedto turn back and give our parents just one more chance to understand us. 

What, also, we might have pointed out was that in a five-cent storythe villain was absolutely sure of receiving suitable and adequatepunishment for his misdeeds. Right then and there, on the spot, hegot his. And the heroine was always so pluperfectly pure. And the heroalways was a hero to his finger tips, never doing anything unmanly orwrong or cowardly, and always using the most respectful language inthe presence of the opposite sex. There was never any sex problem ina nickul librury. There were never any smutty words or questionablephrases. If a villain said "Curse you!" he was going pretty far. Any oneof us might whet up our natural instincts for cruelty on Fore's Bookof Martyrs, or read of all manner of unmentionable horrors in the OldTestament, but except surreptitiously we couldn't walk with Nick Carter, whose motives were ever pure and who never used the naughty word even inthe passion of the death grapple with the top-booted forces of sinisterevil. 

We might have told our parents, had we had the words in which to statethe case and they but the patience to listen, that in a nickul librurythere was logic and the thrill of swift action and the sharp spiceof adventure. There, invariably virtue was rewarded and villainyconfounded; there, inevitably was the final triumph for law and forjustice and for the right; there embalmed in one thin paper volume, wasall that Sandford and Merton lacked; all that the Rollo books neverhad. We might have told them that though the Leatherstocking Tales andRobinson Crusoe and Two Years Before the Mast and Ivanhoe were all wellenough in their way, the trouble with them was that they mainly were solong-winded. It took so much time to get to where the first punchwas, whereas Ned Buntline or Col. Prentiss Ingraham would hand you anexciting jolt on the very first page, and sometimes in the very firstparagraph. 

You take J. Fenimore Cooper now. He meant well and he had ideas, but hisIndians were so everlastingly slow about getting under way with theirscalping operations! Chapter after chapter there was so much fashionableand difficult language that the plot was smothered. You couldn't see thewoods for the trees, But it was the accidental finding of an ancient andreminiscent volume one Sunday in a little hotel which gave me the cue towhat really made us such confirmed rebels against constituted authority, in a literary way of speaking. The thing which inspired us with hatredfor the so-called juvenile classic was a thing which struck deeper eventhan the sentiments I have been trying to describe. 

The basic reason, the underlying motive, lay in the fact that in theschoolbooks of our adolescence, and notably in the school readers, our young mentalities were fed forcibly on a pap which affronted ourintelligence at the same time that it cloyed our adolescent palates. It was not altogether the lack of action; it was more the lack of plaincommon sense in the literary spoon victuals which they ladled into us atschool that caused our youthful souls to revolt. In the final analysisit was this more than any other cause which sent us up to the haymow fordelicious, forbidden hours in the company of Calamity Jane and Wild BillHickok. 

Midway of the old dog-eared reader which I picked up that day I cameacross a typical example of the sort of stuff I mean. I hadn't seenit before in twenty-five years; but now, seeing it, I remembered itas clearly almost as though it had been the week before instead of aquarter of a century before when for the first time it had been broughtto my attention. It was a piece entitled, The Shipwreck, and it began asfollows:

 In the winter of 1824 Lieutenant G-----, of the United States Navy, with his beautiful wife and child, embarked in a packet at Norfolk bound to South Carolina. 

So far so good. At least, here is a direct beginning. A family groupis going somewhere. There is an implied promise that before they havetraveled very far something of interest to the reader will happen tothem. Sure enough, the packet runs into a storm and founders. As sheis going down Lieutenant G----- puts his wife and baby into a lifeboatmanned by sailors, and then--there being no room for him in thelifeboat--he remains behind upon the deck of the sinking vessel, whilethe lifeboat puts off for shore. A giant wave overturns the burdenedcockleshell and he sees its passengers engulfed in the waters. Up tothis point the chronicle has been what a chronicle should be. Perhapsthe phraseology has been a trifle toploftical, and there are a few wordsin it long enough to run as serials, yet at any rate we are getting aneffect in drama. But bear with me while I quote the next paragraph, justas I copied it down:

 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 corpse--the victim of a sublime sensibility!

There's language for you! How different it is from that historic passagewhen the crack of Little Sure Shot's rifle rang out and another Redskinbit the dust. Nothing is said there about anybody having his sublunaryprospects shut off; nothing about the Redskin becoming the victim of asublime sensibility. In fifteen graphic words and in one sentence LittleSure Shot croaked him, and then with bated breath you moved on to thenext paragraph, sure of finding in it yet more attractive casualtiessnappily narrated. 

No, sir! In the nickul librury the author did not waste his timeand yours telling you that an individual on becoming a corpse wouldsimultaneously become powerless and senseless. He credited yourintelligence for something. For contrast, take the immortal workentitled Deadwood Dick of Deadwood; or, The Picked Party; by EdwardL. Wheeler, a copy of which has just come to my attention again nearlythirty years after the time of my first reading of it. Consider theopening paragraph:

 The sun was just kissing the mountain tops that frowned down upon Billy-Goat 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 well-played 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 retreated in the ascending from the gulch bottom. 

That, as I recall, was a powerfully long bit of description for a nickullibrury, and having got it out of his system Mr. Wheeler wasted nomore valuable space on the scenery. From this point on he gave youaction--action with reason behind it and logic to it and the guaranty ofa proper climax and a satisfactory conclusion to follow. Deadwood Dickmarched many a flower-strewn mile through my young life, but to the bestof my recollection he never shut off anybody's sublunary prospects. Ifa party deserved killing Deadwood just naturally up and killed him, and the historian told about it in graphic yet straightforward terms ofspeech; and that was all there was to it, and that was all there shouldhave been to it. 

At the risk of being termed an iconoclast and a smasher of the purehigh ideals of the olden days, I propose to undertake to show thatpractically all of the preposterous asses and the impossible idiots ofliterature found their way into the school readers of my generation. With the passage of years there may have been some reform in thisdirection, but I dare affirm, without having positive knowledge of thefacts, that a majority of these half-wits still are being featured inthe grammar-grade literature of the present time. The authors of schoolreaders, even modern school readers, surely are no smarter than the runof grown-ups even, say, as you and as I; and we blindly go on holdingup as examples before the eyes of the young of the period the charactersand the acts of certain popular figures of poetry and prose who--did butwe give them the acid test of reason--would reveal themselves eitheras incurable idiots, or else as figures in scenes and incidents whichphysically could never have occurred. 

You remember, don't you, the schoolbook classic of the noble lad who byreason of his neat dress, and by his use in the most casual conversationof the sort of language which the late Mr. Henry James used when he waswriting his very Jamesiest, secured a job as a trusted messenger in thelarge city store or in the city's large store, if we are going to bepurists about it, as the boy in question undoubtedly was?

It seems that he had supported his widowed mother and a large familyof brothers and sisters by shoveling snow and, I think, laying brick orsomething of that technical nature. After this lapse of years I won'tbe sure about the bricklaying, but at any rate, work was slack in hisregular line, and so he went to the proprietor of this vast retailestablishment and procured a responsible position on the strength ofhis easy and graceful personal address and his employment of some of themost stylish adjectives in the dictionary. At this time he was nearlyseven years old--yes, sir, actually nearly seven. We have the word ofthe schoolbook for it. We should have had a second chapter on this boy. Probably at nine he was being considered for president of Yale--no, Harvard. He would know too much to be president of Yale. 

Then there was the familiar instance of the Spartan youth who havingstolen a fox and hidden it inside his robe calmly stood up and let theanimal 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 wasserved? 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 ofschool readers would phrase it. This, right at the beginning, makesthe morality of the transaction highly dubious. In the second place, heshowed poor taste. If he was going to swipe something, why should he nothave swiped a chicken or something else of practical value?

We waive that point, though, and come to the lack of discretion shownby the fox. He starts eating his way out through the boy, a messy anddifficult procedure, when merely by biting an aperture in the tunic hecould have emerged by the front way with ease and dispatch. And what isthe final upshot of it all? The boy falls dead, with a large unsightlygap in the middle of him. Probably, too, he was a boy whose parentswere raising him for their own purposes. As it is, all gnawed up inthis fashion and deceased besides, he loses his attractions for everyoneexcept the undertaker. The fox presumably has an attack of acuteindigestion. And there you are! Compare the moral of this with the moralof any one of the Old Cap Collier series, where virtue comes into itsown 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 aboutthe small boy who lived in Holland among the dikes and dams, and oneevening he went across the country to carry a few illustrated post cardsor some equally suitable gift to a poor blind man, and on his way backhome in the twilight he discovered a leak in the sea wall. If hewent for help the breach might widen while he was gone and the wholestructure give way, and then the sea would come roaring in, carryingdeath and destruction and windmills and wooden shoes and pineapplecheeses on its crest. At least, this is the inference one gathers fromreading Mr. McGuffey's account of the affair. 

So what does the quick-witted youngster do? He shoves his little armin the crevice on the inner side, where already the water is tricklingthrough, thus blocking the leak. All night long he stands there, onesmall, half-frozen Dutch boy holding back the entire North Atlantic. Not until centuries later, when Judge Alton B. Parker runs for presidentagainst Colonel Roosevelt and is defeated practically by acclamationis there to be presented so historic and so magnificent an example of acontest against tremendous odds. In the morning a peasant, going out tomow the tulip beds, finds the little fellow crouched at the foot of thedike and inquires what ails him. The lad, raising his weary head--butwait, I shall quote the exact language of the book:

 "I am hindering the sea from running in, " was the simple reply of the child. 

Simple? I'll say it is! Positively nothing could be simpler unless it bethe stark simplicity of the mind of an author who figures that when theAtlantic Ocean starts boring its way through a crack in a sea wall youcan stop it by plugging the hole on the inner side of the sea wall witha small boy's arm. Ned Buntline may never have enjoyed the vogue amongparents and teachers that Mr. McGuffey enjoyed, but I'll say thisfor him--he knew more about the laws of hydraulics than McGuffey everdreamed. 

And there was Peter Hurdle, the ragged lad who engaged in a long buttiresome 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 atea raw turnip. Raw turnips, it would appear, grew all the year round inthe fields of the favored land where Peter resided. If the chill windsof autumn blew in through one of the holes in Peter's trousers they blewright out again through another hole. And he didn't care to accept thedime which Mr. Lenox in an excess of generosity offered him, because, it seemed, he already had a dime. When it came to being plumb contentedthere probably never was a soul on this earth that was the equal ofMaster Hurdle. He even was satisfied with his name which I would regardas the ultimate test. 

Likewise, there was the case of Hugh Idle and Mr. Toil. Perhaps yourecall that moving story? Hugh tries to dodge work; wherever he goes hefinds Mr. Toil in one guise or another but always with the same harshvoice and the same frowning eyes, bossing some job in a manner whichwould cost him his boss-ship right off the reel in these times whenunion labor is so touchy. And what is the moral to be drawn from thisnarrative? I know that all my life I have been trying to get away fromwork, feeling that I was intended for leisure, though never findingtime somehow to take it up seriously. But what was the use of trying todiscourage me from this agreeable idea back yonder in the formulativeperiod of my earlier years?

In Harper's Fourth Reader, edition of 1888, I found an article entitledThe Difference Between the Plants and Animals. It takes up several pagesand includes some of the fanciest language the senior Mr. Harper coulddisinter from the Unabridged. In my own case--and I think I was no moreobservant than the average urchin of my age--I can scarcely remembera time when I could not readily determine certain basic distinctionsbetween such plants and such animals as a child is likely to encounterin the temperate parts of North America. 

While emerging from infancy some of my contemporaries may have falleninto the error of the little boy who came into the house with a hauntedlook in his eye and asked his mother if mulberries had six legs apieceand ran round in the dust of the road, and when she told him that suchwas not the case with mulberries he said: "Then, mother, I feel that Ihave made a mistake. "

To the best of my recollection, I never made this mistake, or at leastif I did I am sure I made no inquiry afterward which might tend furtherto increase my doubts; and in any event I am sure that by the time Iwas old enough to stumble over Mr. Harper's favorite big words I was oldenough to tell the difference between an ordinary animal--say, a housecat--and any one of the commoner forms of plant life, such as, forexample, the scaly-bark hickory tree, practically at a glance. I'll addthis too: Nick Carter never wasted any of the golden moments whichhe and I spent together in elucidating for me the radical points ofdifference between the plants and the animals. 

In the range of poetry selected by the compilers of the readers for myespecial benefit as I progressed onward from the primary class intothe grammar grades I find on examination of these earlier Americanauthorities an even greater array of chuckleheads than appear in theprose divisions. I shall pass over the celebrated instance--as read byus in class in a loud tone of voice and without halt for inflection orthe taking of breath--of the Turk who at midnight in his guarded tentwas dreaming of the hour when Greece her knees in suppliance bent wouldtremble at his power. I remember how vaguely I used to wonder who it wasthat was going to grease her knees and why she should feel called uponto have them greased at all. Also, I shall pass over the instance ofAbou Ben Adhem, whose name led all the rest in the golden book in whichthe angel was writing. Why shouldn't it have led all the rest? A manwhose front name begins with Ab, whose middle initial is B, and whoselast name begins with Ad will be found leading all the rest in any citydirectory or any telephone list anywhere. Alphabetically organized as hewas, Mr. Adhem just naturally had to lead; and yet for hours on end myteaches consumed her energies and mine in a more or less unsuccessfuleffort to cause me to memorize the details as set forth by Mr. LeighHunt. 

In three separate schoolbooks, each the work of a different compilator, I discover Sir Walter Scott's poetic contribution touching on YoungLochinvar--Young Lochinvar who came out of the West, the same as thePlumb plan subsequently came, and the Hiram Johnson presidential boomand the initiative and the referendum and the I. W. W. Even in thoseancient times the West appears to have been a favorite place forupsetting things to come from; so I can't take issue with Sir Walterthere. But I do take issue with him where he says:

 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 ofYoung Lochinvar to perform this achievement, for I was born and broughtup in a horseback-riding country. Now in the light of yet fullerexperience I wish Sir Walter were alive to-day so I might argue thequestion out with him. 

Let us consider the statement on its physical merits solely. Herewe have Young Lochinvar swinging the lady to the croupe, and then hesprings to the saddle in front of her. Now to do this he must eithertake a long running start and leapfrog clear over the lady's head asshe sits there, and land accurately in the saddle, which is scarcely aproper thing to do to any lady, aside from the difficulty of springingten or fifteen feet into the air and coming down, crotched out, on agiven spot, or else he must contribute a feat in contortion the like ofwhich has never been duplicated since. 

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 freshtripe--and he certainly did shake a lithesome calf in the measures ofthe dance if Sir Walter, in an earlier stanza, is to be credited withveracity. 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. BuffaloBill couldn't have done it. Ned Buntline wouldn't have had Buffalo Billtrying to do it. Doug Fairbanks couldn't do it. I couldn't do it myself. 

Skipping over Robert Southey's tiresome redundancy in spending so muchof his time and mine, when I was in the Fifth Reader stage, in tellinghow the waters came down at Ladore when it was a petrified cinch thatthey, being waters, would have to come down, anyhow, I would next directyour 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, butboth embalmed in verse, and both, mind you, stuck into every orthodoxreader to be glorified before the eyes of childhood. I refer to thatjuvenile 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 brieflyconsider the given facts as regards the latter: It was winter and it wasmidnight and a storm was on the deep, and the passengers were huddled inthe cabin and not a soul would dare to sleep, and they were shudderingthere in silence--one gathers the silence was so deep you could hearthem shuddering--and the stoutest held his breath, which is considerablefeat, as I can testify, because the stouter a fellow gets the harder itis for him to hold his breath for any considerable period of time. Verywell, then, this is the condition of affairs. If ever there was a timewhen those in authority should avoid spreading alarm this was the time. By all the traditions of the maritime service it devolved upon theskipper to remain calm, cool and collected. But what does the poetreveal to a lot of trusting school children?

 "We are lost!" the captain shouted, As he staggered down the stair. 

He didn't whisper it; he didn't tell it to a friend in confidence; hebellowed it out at the top of his voice so all the passengers could hearhim. The only possible excuse which can be offered for that captain'sbehavior is that his staggering was due not to the motion of the shipbut to alcoholic stimulant. Could you imagine Little Sure Shot, theTerror of the Pawnees, drunk or sober, doing an asinine thing like that?Not in ten thousand years, you couldn't. But then we must rememberthat Little Sure Shot, being a moral dime-novel hero, never indulged inalcoholic beverages under any circumstances. 

The boy who stood on the burning deck has been played up as an exampleof youthful heroism for the benefit of the young of our race ever sinceMrs. Felicia Dorothea Hemans set him down in black and white. I denythat he was heroic. I insist that he merely was feeble-minded. Let usgive this youth the careful once-over: The scene is the Battle of theNile. The time is August, 1798. When the action of the piece begins theboy 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 stuckbecause his father had posted him there. There was no good purposehe might serve by sticking, except to furnish added material for thepoetess, but like the leather-headed young imbecile that he was he stoodthere with his feet getting warmer all the time, while the flame thatlit the battle's wreck shone round him o'er the dead. After which:

 There came a burst of thunder sound; The boy--oh! where was he? Ask of the winds, that far around With fragments strewed the sea--

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 outseta liability rather than an asset. Had he lived, undoubtedly he wouldhave wound up in a home for the feeble-minded. It is better so, as itis--better that he should be spread about over the surface of the oceanin a broad general way, thus saving all the expense and trouble ofgathering him up and burying him and putting a tombstone over him. Hewas one of the incurables. 

Once upon a time, writing a little piece on another subject, I advancedthe claim that the champion half-wit of all poetic anthology was SweetAlice, who, as described by Mr. English, wept with delight when you gaveher a smile, and trembled in fear at your frown. This of course was longbefore Prohibition came in. These times there are many ready to weepwith delight when you offer to give them a smile; but in Mr. English'stime and Alice's there were plenty of saloons handy. I remarked, what anawful kill-joy Alice must have been, weeping in a disconcerting mannerwhen somebody smiled in her direction and trembling violently shouldanybody so much as merely knit his brow!

But when I gave Alice first place in the list I acted too hastily. Second thought should have informed me that undeniably the post ofhonor belonged to the central figure of Mr. Henry W. Longfellow'spoem, Excelsior. I ran across it--Excelsior, I mean--in three differentreaders the other day when I was compiling some of the data for thistreatise. Naturally it would be featured in all three. It wouldn't do toleave Mr. Longfellow's hero out of a volume in which space was given tosuch lesser village idiots as Casabianca and the Spartan youth. Let ustake up this sad case verse by verse:

 The shades of night were falling fast, As through an Alpine village passed A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice, A banner with the strange device, Excelsior!

There we get an accurate pen picture of his young man's deplorablestate. He is climbing a mountain in the dead of winter. It is made plainlater on that he is a stranger in the neighborhood, consequently it isfair to assume that the mountain in question is one he has never climbedbefore. Nobody hired him to climb any mountain; he isn't climbing it ona bet or because somebody dared him to climb one. He is not dressedfor mountain climbing. Apparently he is wearing the costume in whichhe escaped from the institution where he had been an inmate--a costumeconsisting simply of low stockings, sandals and a kind of flowing woolennightshirt, cut short to begin with and badly shrunken in the wash. Hehas on no rubber boots, no sweater, not even a pair of ear muffs. Healso is bare-headed. Well, any time the wearing of hats went out offashion he could have had no use for his head, anyhow. 

I grant you that in the poem Mr. Longfellow does not go into detailsregarding the patient's garb. I am going by the illustration in thereader. The original Mr. McGuffey was very strong for illustrations. Hestuck them in everywhere in his readers, whether they matched the themesor not. Being as fond of pictures as he undoubtedly was, it seems almosta pity he did not marry the tattooed lady in a circus and then when hegot tired of studying her pictorially on one side he could ask herto 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 theMcGuffeys. 

Be that as it may, the wardrobe is entirely unsuited for the rigors ofthe climate in Switzerland in winter time. Symptomatically it marks thewearer as a person who is mentally lacking. He needs a keeper almost asbadly as he needs some heavy underwear. But this isn't the worst ofit. Take the banner. It bears the single word "Excelsior. " The youth isgoing through a strange town late in the evening in his nightie, andit winter time, carrying a banner advertising a shredded wood-fibercommodity which won't be invented until a hundred and fifty years afterhe is dead!

Can you beat it? You can't even tie it. 

Let us look further into the matter:

 His brow was sad; his eyes beneath Flashed like a falchion from its sheath, And like a silver clarion rung The accents of that unknown tongue, Excelsior!

Get it, don't you? Even his features fail to jibe. His brow iscorrugated with grief, but the flashing of the eye denotes a lack ofintellectual coherence which any alienist would diagnose at a glance asevidence of total dementia, even were not confirmatory proof offeredby his action in huckstering for a product which doesn't exist, in alanguage which no one present can understand. The most delirious typhoidfever patient you ever saw would know better than that. 

To continue:

 In happy homes he saw the light Of household fires gleam warm and bright; Above, the spectral glaciers shone, And from his lips escaped a groan, Excelsior!

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 thoseshifts characteristic of the mentally unbalanced, his mood changes andagain he is shouting. He's worse than a cuckoo clock, that boy. 

 "Try not the Pass, " the old man said; "Dark lowers the tempest overhead, The roaring torrent is deep and wide!" And loud that clarion voice replied, Excelsior!

 "Oh stay, " the maiden said, "and rest Thy weary head upon this breast!" A tear stood in his bright blue eye, But still he answered, with a sigh, Excelsior!

 "Beware the pine-tree's withered branch! Beware the awful avalanche!" This was the peasant's last Good night; A voice replied, far up the height, Excelsior!

These three verses round out the picture. The venerable citizen warnshim against the Pass; pass privileges up that mountain have all beensuspended. A kind-hearted maiden tenders hospitalities of a mostgenerous nature, considering that she never saw the young man before. Some people might even go so far as to say that she should have beenashamed of herself; others, that Mr. Longfellow, in giving her away, was guilty of an indelicacy, to say the least of it. Possibly she waspracticing up to qualify for membership on the reception committee thenext time the visiting firemen came to her town or when there was goingto be an Elks' reunion; so I for one shall not question her motives. She was hospitable--let it go at that. The peasant couples with hisgood-night message a reference to the danger of falling pine wood andalso avalanches, which have never been pleasant things to meet up withwhen one is traveling on a mountain in an opposite direction. 

All about him firelights are gleaming, happy families are gatheredbefore the hearthstone, and through the windows the evening yodel may beheard percolating pleasantly. There is every inducement for the youthto drop in and rest his poor, tired, foolish face and hands and thawout his knee joints and give the maiden a chance to make good onthat proposition of hers. But no, high up above timber line he has anengagement with himself and Mr. Longfellow to be frozen as stiff as adried herring; and so, now groaning, now with his eye flashing, now witha tear--undoubtedly a frozen tear--standing in the eye, now clarioning, now sighing, onward and upward he goes:

 At break of day, as heavenward The pious monks of Saint Bernard Uttered the oft-repeated prayer, A voice cried through the startled air, Excelsior!

I'll say this much for him: He certainly is hard to kill. He can stayout all night in those clothes, with the thermometer below zero, andat dawn still be able to chirp the only word that is left in hisvocabulary. He can't last forever though. There has to be a finish tothis 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 banner with the strange device, Excelsior!

 There in the twilight cold and gray, Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay, And from the sky serene and far, A voice fell, like a falling star, Excelsior!

The meteoric voice said "Excelsior!" It should have said "Bonehead!" Itwould 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 thereasons why they barred his works out of all the schoolbooks. 

With the passage of years I rather imagine that Lieutenant G-----, ofthe United States Navy, who went to so much trouble and took so manyneedless pains in order to become a corpse may have vanished fromthe school readers. I admit I failed to find him in any of the moderneditions through which I glanced, but I am able to report, as aresult of my researches, that the well-known croupe specialist, YoungLochinvar, 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 thislittle book, I happened upon an advertisement in a New York paper of anauction sale of a collection of so-called dime novels, dating back tothe old Beadle's Boy's Library in the early eighties and coming ondown through the years into the generation when Nick and Old Cap weresucceeding some of the earlier favorites. I read off a few of theleading titles upon the list:

Bronze Jack, the California Thoroughbred; or, The Lost City of theBasaltic Buttes. A strange story of a desperate adventure after fortunein the weird, wild Apache land. By Albert W. Aiken. 

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

The Tarantula of Taos; or, Giant George's Revenge. A tale of Sardine-boxCity, Arizona. By Major Sam S. (Buckskin Sam) Hall. 

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

Old Grizzly Adams, the Bear Tamer; or, The Monarch of the Mountains. 

Deadly Eye and the Prairie Rover. 

Arizona Joe, the Boy Pard of Texas Jack. 

Pacific Pete, the Prince of the Revolver. 

Kit Carson, King of the Guides. 

Leadville Nick, the Boy Sport; or, The Mad Miner's Revenge. 

Lighthouse Lige; or, The Firebrand of the Everglades. 

The Desperate Dozen; or, The Fair Fiend. 

Nighthawk Kit; or, The Daughter of the Ranch. 

Joaquin, the Saddle King. 

Mustang Sam, the Wild Rider of the Plains. 

Adventures of Wild Bill, the Pistol Prince, from Youth to his Death byAssassination. Deeds of Daring, Adventure and Thrilling Incidents in theLife of J. B. Hickok, known to the World as Wild Bill. 

These titles and many another did I read, and reading them my mind slidback along a groove in my brain to a certain stable loft in a certainKentucky town, and I said to myself that if I had a boy--say, abouttwelve or fourteen years old--I would go to this auction and bid inthese books and I would back them up and reenforce them with some ofthe best of the collected works of Nick Carter and Cap Collier andNick Carter, Jr. , and Frank Reade, and I would buy, if I could find itanywhere, a certain paper-backed volume dealing with the life of theJames boys--not Henry and William, but Jesse and Frank--which I readever so long ago; and I would confer the whole lot of them upon thatoffspring of mine and I would say to him:

"Here, my son, is something for you; a rare and precious gift. Readthese volumes openly. Never mind the crude style in which most of themare written. It can't be any worse than the stilted and artificial stylein which your school reader is written; and, anyhow, if you are evergoing 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 andchuck 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 tostart with you will have what is called style in writing, and if youhaven't that sense of good taste you won't have a style and nothing cangive it to you. 

"Read them for the thrills that are in them. Read them, rememberingthat if this country had not had a pioneer breed of Buckskin Sams andDeadwood Dicks we should have had no native school of dime novelists. Read them for their brisk and stirring movement; for the spirit ofoutdoor adventure and life which crowds them; for their swift butlogical processions of sequences; for the phases of pioneer Americanismthey rawly but graphically portray, and for their moral values. Readthem along with your Coopers and your Ivanhoe and your Mayne Reids. Readthem through, and perhaps some day, if fortune is kinder to you thanever it was to your father, with a background behind you and a visionbefore you, you may be inspired to sit down and write a dime novel ofyour own almost good enough to be worthy of mention in the same breathwith the two greatest adventure stories--dollar-sized dime novels iswhat they really are--that ever were written; written, both of them, bysure-enough writing men, who, I'm sure, must have based their moods andtheir modes upon the memories of the dime novels which they, they intheir turn, read when they were boys of your age. 

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