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 retai