h 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