A Plea for Old Cap Collier | Page 3

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This Etext prepared by Kirk Pearson

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