A Plea for Old Cap Collier | Page 7

job as a trusted
messenger in the large city store or in the city's large store, if we are
going to be purists about it, as the boy in question undoubtedly was?
It seems that he had supported his widowed mother and a large family
of brothers and sisters by shoveling snow and, I think, laying brick or
something of that technical nature. After this lapse of years I won't be
sure about the bricklaying, but at any rate, work was slack in his regular

line, and so he went to the proprietor of this vast retail establishment
and procured a responsible position on the strength of his easy and
graceful personal address and his employment of some of the most
stylish adjectives in the dictionary. At this time he was nearly seven
years old--yes, sir, actually nearly seven. We have the word of the
schoolbook for it. We should have had a second chapter on this boy.
Probably at nine he was being considered for president of Yale--no,
Harvard. He would know too much to be president of Yale.
Then there was the familiar instance of the Spartan youth who having
stolen a fox and hidden it inside his robe calmly stood up and let the
animal gnaw his vitals rather than be caught with it in his possession.
But, why? I ask you, why? What was the good of it all? What object
was served? To begin with, the boy had absconded with somebody
else's fox, or with somebody's else fox, which is undoubtedly the way a
compiler of school readers would phrase it. This, right at the beginning,
makes the morality of the transaction highly dubious. In the second
place, he showed poor taste. If he was going to swipe something, why
should he not have swiped a chicken or something else of practical
value?
We waive that point, though, and come to the lack of discretion shown
by the fox. He starts eating his way out through the boy, a messy and
difficult procedure, when merely by biting an aperture in the tunic he
could have emerged by the front way with ease and dispatch. And what
is the final upshot of it all? The boy falls dead, with a large unsightly
gap in the middle of him. Probably, too, he was a boy whose parents
were raising him for their own purposes. As it is, all gnawed up in this
fashion and deceased besides, he loses his attractions for everyone
except the undertaker. The fox presumably has an attack of acute
indigestion. And there you are! Compare the moral of this with the
moral of any one of the Old Cap Collier series, where virtue comes into
its own and sanity is prevalent throughout and vice gets what it
deserves, and all.
In McGuffey's Third Reader, I think it was, occurred that story about
the small boy who lived in Holland among the dikes and dams, and one
evening he went across the country to carry a few illustrated post cards
or some equally suitable gift to a poor blind man, and on his way back
home in the twilight he discovered a leak in the sea wall. If he went for

help the breach might widen while he was gone and the whole structure
give way, and then the sea would come roaring in, carrying death and
destruction and windmills and wooden shoes and pineapple cheeses on
its crest. At least, this is the inference one gathers from reading Mr.
McGuffey's account of the affair.
So what does the quick-witted youngster do? He shoves his little arm in
the crevice on the inner side, where already the water is trickling
through, thus blocking the leak. All night long he stands there, one
small, half-frozen Dutch boy holding back the entire North Atlantic.
Not until centuries later, when Judge Alton B. Parker runs for president
against Colonel Roosevelt and is defeated practically by acclamation is
there to be presented so historic and so magnificent an example of a
contest against tremendous odds. In the morning a peasant, going out to
mow the tulip beds, finds the little fellow crouched at the foot of the
dike and inquires what ails him. The lad, raising his weary head--but
wait, I shall quote the exact language of the book:
"I am hindering the sea from running in," was the simple reply of the
child.
Simple? I'll say it is! Positively nothing could be simpler unless it be
the stark simplicity of the mind of an author who figures that when the
Atlantic Ocean starts boring its way through a crack in a sea wall you
can stop it by plugging the hole on the inner side of the sea wall with a
small boy's arm. Ned Buntline may never have