and the most secretive of living creatures regarding his innermost
emotions, rarely does bare his real thoughts to his elders, for
they, alas, are not young enough to have a fellow feeling, and
they are too old and they know too much to be really wise.

What we might have answered, had we had the verbal facility and
had we not feared further 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,