to it.

At the risk of being termed an iconoclast and a smasher of the
pure high ideals of the olden days, I propose to undertake to show
that practically all of the preposterous asses and the impossible
idiots of literature found their way into the school readers of
my generation. With the passage of years there may have been some
reform in this direction, but I dare affirm, without having positive
knowledge of the facts, that a majority of these half-wits still
are being featured in the grammar-grade literature of the present
time. The authors of school readers, even modern school readers,
surely are no smarter than the run of grown-ups even, say, as you
and as I; and we blindly go on holding up as examples before the
eyes of the young of the period the characters and the acts of
certain popular figures of poetry and prose who--did but we give
them the acid test of reason--would reveal themselves either as
incurable idiots, or else as figures in scenes and incidents which
physically could never have occurred.

You remember, don't you, the schoolbook classic of the noble lad
who by reason of his neat dress, and by his use in the most casual
conversation of the sort of language which the late Mr. Henry
James used when he was writing his very Jamesiest, secured a 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