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!