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+The Project Gutenberg Etext A Plea for Old Cap Collier, by Cobb
+#4 in our series by Irvin S. Cobb
+
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+A Plea for Old Cap Collier
+
+by Irvin S. Cobb
+
+Spetember, 1999  [Etext #1891]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext A Plea for Old Cap Collier, by Cobb
+*****This file should be named pfocc10.txt or pfocc10.zip******
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+This Etext prepared by Kirk Pearson <kpearson@nyx.net>
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+
+
+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 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 was mailorder tabs and price
+currents.
+
+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 head--this idea which, as one
+might say, had been aged in the wood--took shape.  Then and there
+I decided that the very first chance I had I would sit me down and
+write a plea for Old Cap Collier.
+
+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 old-fashioned 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 red-hot 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 dress-up
+clothes--just 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, which is a very different thing.
+
+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 which--being disciplined--my 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 violation--without 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 elders as dime novels.
+
+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 circulating-library 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 Big-Foot 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 surrounded
+by a ring of cruel, gloating eyes?
+
+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 your shoulder.
+
+And at home were you caught in the act of reading them, or--what
+from the parental standpoint was almost as bad--in 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 novels--only they weren't dime novels at all but cost
+uniformly five cents a copy--always 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 so-called classics.  Their style
+was so much like the style of the books which older people wanted
+me to read when I was in my early teens.
+
+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 fellow feeling, and
+they are too old and they know too much to be really wise.
+
+What we might have answered, had we had the verbal facility and
+had we not feared further painful corporeal measures for talking
+back--or what was worse, ridicule--was 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 impending--we decided to 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
+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 with the top-booted forces
+of sinister evil.
+
+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 long-winded.  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 first page, and sometimes in the very first paragraph.
+
+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 so-called juvenile classic was a thing which struck deeper
+even than the sentiments I have been trying to describe.
+
+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 dog-eared 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 twenty-five 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, embarked in a packet
+  at Norfolk bound to South Carolina.
+
+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 then--there
+being no room for him in the lifeboat--he 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 with me while I quote the next paragraph, just
+as 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
+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 time of my first reading of it.
+Consider the opening 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
+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 action--action 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 flower-strewn 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 half-wits still
+are being featured in the grammar-grade literature of the present
+time.  The authors of school readers, even modern school readers,
+surely are no smarter than the run of grown-ups 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 who--did but we give
+them the acid test of reason--would reveal themselves either as
+incurable idiots, or else as figures in scenes and incidents which
+physically could never have occurred.
+
+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 old--yes, 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 Yale--no, Harvard.  He would know too much to be president of
+Yale.
+
+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 have swiped a chicken or something else of practical value?
+
+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. McGuffey's account of the
+affair.
+
+So what does the quick-witted 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, half-frozen 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
+head--but wait, 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 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 him--he knew more about
+the laws of hydraulics than McGuffey ever dreamed.
+
+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 regard as the ultimate test.
+
+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 boss-ship 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
+this agreeable idea back yonder in the formulative period of my
+earlier years?
+
+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
+case--and I think I was no more observant than the average urchin
+of my age--I 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 America.
+
+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: "Then, mother, I feel that I have made a mistake."
+
+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 animal--say, a house cat--and any one of the commoner
+forms of plant life, such as, for example, the scaly-bark 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 between the
+plants and the animals.
+
+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
+instance--as read by us in class in a loud tone of voice and without
+halt for inflection or the taking of breath--of 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 me to memorize the
+details as set forth by Mr. Leigh Hunt.
+
+In three separate schoolbooks, each the work of a different
+compilator, I discover Sir Walter Scott's poetic contribution
+touching on Young Lochinvar--Young 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 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 of Young Lochinvar to perform this achievement, for I
+was born and brought up in a horseback-riding country.  Now in
+the light of yet fuller experience I wish Sir Walter were alive
+to-day 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 which 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 fresh tripe--and 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 myself.
+
+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 silence--one gathers the silence
+was so deep you could hear them shuddering--and 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 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;
+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
+dime-novel hero, never indulged in alcoholic beverages under any
+circumstances.
+
+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 feeble-minded.  Let us give this youth the careful once-over:
+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 leather-headed 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 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 outset a liability rather than an asset.  Had he
+lived, undoubtedly he would have wound up in a home for the
+feeble-minded.  It is better so, as it is--better 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 half-wit 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 kill-joy Alice must have been, weeping in a disconcerting
+manner when somebody smiled in her direction and trembling
+violently should anybody 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
+of honor belonged to the central figure of Mr. Henry W. Longfellow's
+poem, Excelsior.  I ran across it--Excelsior, I mean--in 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.  Let us take 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 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 inmate--a 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 bare-headed.  Well, any time the wearing of
+hats went out of fashion he could have had no use for his head,
+anyhow.
+
+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 wood-fiber commodity which won't be invented
+until a hundred and fifty years after he 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 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 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 those shifts characteristic of the mentally unbalanced, his
+mood changes and again 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
+warns him against the Pass; pass privileges up that mountain have
+all been suspended.  A kind-hearted 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
+hospitable--let it go at that.  The peasant couples with his
+good-night 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
+direction.
+
+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 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
+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 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!"
+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 reasons why they barred his works out of all the
+schoolbooks.
+
+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 well-known 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 so-called 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 upon the list:
+
+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
+Sardine-box City, 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 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
+boy--say, about twelve or fourteen years old--I 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 paper-backed volume
+dealing with the life of the James boys--not Henry and William,
+but Jesse and Frank--which 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 good taste you won't have a style and nothing can
+give it to you.
+
+"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 stories--dollar-sized dime novels is
+what they really are--that ever were written; written, both of
+them, by sure-enough 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."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext A Plea for Old Cap Collier, by Cobb
+
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