ned fool all your
life? That girl doesn't care anything about you. She hasn't thought of
you since. You stay right here and read the pretty books. That's the
place for you."

This advice was sound and wise beyond cavil. So Jeff took it valiantly.
After supper he hobbled Grasshopper and took off the nosebag. Then he
went to the back room in pursuit of literature.

* * * * *

Have I leave for a slight digression, to commit a long-delayed act of
justice--to correct a grievous wrong? Thank you.

We hear much of Mr. Andrew Carnegie and His Libraries, the Hall of Fame,
the Little Red Schoolhouse, the Five-Foot Shelf, and the World's Best
Books. A singular thing is that the most effective bit of philanthropy
along these lines has gone unrecorded of a thankless world. This shall
no longer be.

Know, then, that once upon a time a certain soulless corporation, rather
in the tobacco trade, placed in each package of tobacco a coupon, each
coupon redeemable by one paper-bound book. Whether they were moved by
remorse to this action or by sordid hidden purposes of their own, or,
again, by pure, disinterested and farseeing love of their kind, is not
yet known; but the results remain. There were three hundred and three
volumes on that list, mostly--but not altogether--fiction. And each one
was a classic. Classics are cheap. They are not copyrighted. Could I but
know the anonymous benefactor who enrolled that glorious company, how
gladly would I drop a leaf on his bier or a cherry in his bitters!

Thus it was that, in one brief decade, the cowboys, with others, became
comparatively literate. Cowboys all smoked. Doubtless that was a chief
cause contributory to making them the wrecks they were. It destroyed
their physique; it corroded and ate away their will power--leaving them
seldom able to work over nineteen hours a day, except in emergencies;
prone to abandon duty in the face of difficulty or danger, when human
effort, raised to the nth power, could do no more--all things
considered, the most efficient men of their hands on record.

Cowboys all smoked: and the most deep-seated instinct of the human race
is to get something for nothing. They got those books. In due course of
time they read those books. Some were slow to take to it; but when you
stay at lonely ranches, when you are left afoot until the water-holes
dry up, so you may catch a horse in the waterpen--why, you must do
something. The book