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 happen to
them. Sure enough, the packet runs into a storm and founders. As she
is going down Lieutenant G----- puts his wife and baby into a lifeboat
manned by sailors, and then--there being