urther 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 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