A Plea for Old Cap Collier | Page 5

start by the
nickul librury. Burning with a sense of injustice, filled up with the
realization that we were not appreciated at home, we often talked of
running away and going out West to fight Indians, but we never did. I
remember once two of us started for the Far West, and got nearly as far
as Oak Grove Cemetery, when-- the dusk of evening impending--we
decided to turn back and give our parents just one more chance to
understand us.
What, also, we might have pointed out was that in a five-cent story the
villain was absolutely sure of receiving suitable and adequate
punishment for his misdeeds. Right then and there, on the spot, he got
his. And the heroine was always so pluperfectly pure. And the hero
always was a hero to his finger tips, never doing anything unmanly or
wrong or cowardly, and always using the most respectful language in
the presence of the opposite sex. There was never any sex problem in a
nickul librury. There were never any smutty words or questionable
phrases. If a villain said "Curse you!" he was going pretty far. Any one
of us might whet up our natural instincts for cruelty on Fore's Book of
Martyrs, or read of all manner of unmentionable horrors in the Old
Testament, but except surreptitiously we couldn't walk with Nick
Carter, whose motives were ever pure and who never used the naughty
word even in the passion of the death grapple with the top-booted
forces of sinister evil.
We might have told our parents, had we had the words in which to state
the case and they but the patience to listen, that in a nickul librury there
was logic and the thrill of swift action and the sharp spice of adventure.
There, invariably virtue was rewarded and villainy confounded; there,
inevitably was the final triumph for law and for justice and for the right;
there embalmed in one thin paper volume, was all that Sandford and
Merton lacked; all that the Rollo books never had. We might have told
them that though the Leatherstocking Tales and Robinson Crusoe and
Two Years Before the Mast and Ivanhoe were all well enough in their
way, the trouble with them was that they mainly were so long-winded.
It took so much time to get to where the first punch was, whereas Ned
Buntline or Col. Prentiss Ingraham would hand you an exciting jolt on
the very first page, and sometimes in the very first paragraph.
You take J. Fenimore Cooper now. He meant well and he had ideas, but

his Indians were so everlastingly slow about getting under way with
their scalping operations!
Chapter after
chapter there was so much fashionable and difficult language that the
plot was smothered. You couldn't see the woods for the trees, But it
was the accidental finding of an ancient and reminiscent volume one
Sunday in a little hotel which gave me the cue to what really made us
such confirmed rebels against constituted authority, in a literary way of
speaking. The thing which inspired us with hatred for the so-called
juvenile classic was a thing which struck deeper even than the
sentiments I have been trying to describe.
The basic reason, the underlying motive, lay in the fact that in the
schoolbooks of our adolescence, and notably in the school readers, our
young mentalities were fed forcibly on a pap which affronted our
intelligence at the same time that it cloyed our adolescent palates. It
was not altogether the lack of action; it was more the lack of plain
common sense in the literary spoon victuals which they ladled into us
at school that caused our youthful souls to revolt. In the final analysis it
was this more than any other cause which sent us up to the haymow for
delicious, forbidden hours in the company of Calamity Jane and Wild
Bill Hickok.
Midway of the old dog-eared reader which I picked up that day I came
across a typical example of the sort of stuff I mean. I hadn't seen it
before in twenty-five years; but now, seeing it, I remembered it as
clearly almost as though it had been the week before instead of a
quarter of a century before when for the first time it had been brought
to my attention. It was a piece entitled, The Shipwreck, and it began as
follows:
In the winter of 1824 Lieutenant G-----, of the United States Navy, with
his beautiful wife and child, embarked in a packet at Norfolk bound to
South Carolina.
So far so good. At least, here is a direct beginning. A family group is
going somewhere. There is an implied promise that before they have
traveled very far something of interest to the reader will