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 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