A Plea for Old Cap Collier | Page 4

or turned over?"
Sunday was three weeks long, and longer than that if it rained. About
all a fellow could do after he'd come back from Sunday school was to
sit round with his feet cramped into the shoes and stockings which he
never wore on week days and with the rest of him incased in starchy,
uncomfortable dress-up clothes--just sit round and sit round and itch.
You couldn't scratch hard either. It was sinful to scratch audibly and
with good, broad, free strokes, which is the only satisfactory way to
scratch. In our town they didn't spend Sunday; they kept the Sabbath,
which is a very different thing.
Looking back on my juvenile years it seems to me that, generally
speaking, when spanked I deserved it. But always there were two
punishable things against which--being disciplined--my youthful spirit
revolted with a sort of inarticulate sense of injustice. One was for
violation of the Sunday code, which struck me as wrong --the code, I
mean, not the violation--without knowing exactly why it was wrong;
and the other, repeated times without number, was when I had been
caught reading nickul libruries, erroneously referred to by our elders as
dime novels.
I read them at every chance; so did every normal boy of my
acquaintance. We traded lesser treasures for them; we swapped them on
the basis of two old volumes for one new one; we maintained a
clandestine circulating-library system which had its branch offices in
every stable loft in our part of town. The more daring among us read
them in school behind the shelter of an open geography propped up on
the desk.
Shall you ever forget the horror of the moment when, carried away on
the wings of adventure with Nick Carter or Big-Foot Wallace or Frank
Reade or bully Old Cap, you forgot to flash occasional glances of
cautious inquiry forward in order to make sure the teacher was where
she properly should be, at her desk up in front, and read on and on until
that subtle sixth sense which comes to you when a lot of people begin

staring at you warned you something was amiss, and you looked up and
round you and found yourself all surrounded by a ring of cruel,
gloating eyes?
I say cruel advisedly, because up to a certain age children are naturally
more cruel than tigers. Civilization has provided them with tools, as it
were, for practicing cruelty, whereas the tiger must rely only on his
teeth and his bare claws. So you looked round, feeling that the shadow
of an impending doom encompassed you, and then you realized that for
no telling how long the teacher had been standing just behind you,
reading over your shoulder.
And at home were you caught in the act of reading them, or--what from
the parental standpoint was almost as bad--in the act of harboring them?
I was. Housecleaning times, when they found them hidden under
furniture or tucked away on the back shelves of pantry closets, I was
paddled until I had the feelings of a slice of hot, buttered toast
somewhat scorched on the under side. And each time, having been
paddled, I was admonished that boys who read dime novels--only they
weren't dime novels at all but cost uniformly five cents a copy--always
came to a bad end, growing up to be criminals or Republicans or
something equally abhorrent. And I was urged to read books which
would help me to shape my career in a proper course. Such books were
put into my hands, and I loathed them. I know now why when I grew
up my gorge rose and my appetite turned against so-called classics.
Their style was so much like the style of the books which older people
wanted me to read when I was in my early teens.
Such were the specious statements advanced by the oldsters. And we
had no reply for their argument, or if we had one could not find the
language in which to couch it. Besides there was another and a deeper
reason. A boy, being what he is, the most sensitive and the most
secretive of living creatures regarding his innermost emotions, rarely
does bare his real thoughts to his elders, for they, alas, are not young
enough to have a fellow feeling, and they are too old and they know too
much to be really wise.
What we might have answered, had we had the verbal facility and had
we not feared further painful corporeal measures for talking back--or
what was worse, ridicule--was that reading Old Cap Collier never yet
sent a boy to a bad end. I never heard of a boy who ran away from

home and really made a go of it who was actuated at the