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