While she was singing, Julie was confirming the wisdom of a thought she had in mind. For the last half hour she had been making up her mind not to tell Mr. Seaton of his son's death until the morning. It would be Sunday. The papers were often delayed on that day, so it would be an easy matter to keep them away from the library. He seemed so peaceful to-night-she couldn't bear to tell him-to-night.

"Cuckoo-Cuckoo-" she sang joyously, "I nowhere have a home!" Somehow the cheerful little song made Julie happier. That and her resolution to spare Mr. Seaton until

to-morrow.

She got up from the piano and went over to his chair.

"Wake up, dear!" She patted his shoulder. "Twelve fifteen, time to go to bed! You know what they'll do to me they always think I keep you up! I'll ring for Peters."

She leaned over and touched the buzzer; she had never known him to sleep so soundly in his chair.

"Grandpère!" She was puzzled. Peters, an old retainer, never very far away, appeared at her side.

Her voice rose a little. "Peters, he's so sound asleep!"

"Excuse me, Miss!" The old servant suddenly became a person. He leaned over his master. He took one put Julie firmly to one side and of his hands and felt his pulse-then laid it gently back on the arm of the chair.

"Grandpère!" Julie called nerv

ously.

Peters stepped back. "No usecalling-Miss."

"You-mean?" She bent over the quiet figure in the chair.

Julie stood by the apparently sleeping figure in the chair, stunned by the mystery of death. He had spoken to her fifteen minutes ago and now, he would never speak again. A merciful and allwise Power had taken him at a tranquil moment! He had been spared pain that was beyond his strength to endure. There was something beautiful about it, but at the same time, Julie found herself engulfed in a wave of sadness. Tears began to gather in her eyesgreat tears of pity-the abysmal longing to have done greater service for the one who has passed on that comes inexorably into the presence of death. A response to the pathos of that journey which must be taken alone. It all swept over Julie, and tore her heart with great, heavy sobs.

If she only could have done more for him! In a moment the othersthe family-would come in; but for this one moment he belonged to her. She leaned over and kissed the silky white hair on the top of his head.

"Good-by, Grandpère." Her tears showered upon his hair; she wiped them gently away with her small, red handkerchief—it was soaking wet, and she decided to commit a theft; she took old Mr. Seaton's beautiful, monogrammed handkerchief from his pocket and wiped her eyes with it. The perfume clung to it. She would keep that handkerchief always, and

she would never smell that cologne without thinking of Grandpère, if she lived to be a hundred.

When they came in, they found her standing, in her red dress beside the quiet, gray figure in the chair. They swept her away like a dry sirocco. Sure that she had been the victim of their demands, they had no further use for her.

She let them think what they pleased. Some day she would tell the truth to the doctor. It was enough. for her that she had given the old man a last hour of happiness.

That night she had been drafted to play a part which she would have thought was beyond the compass of her meager talent. Never before had she dared to explore the resources which might lie deep in her nature, for fear that if she tried to draw too heavily upon that slender treasury, she would find herself bankrupt.

Now the ghost of that fear was laid. Her "performance" had been a brave one, she knew. There was no one to praise her-no flowers or telegrams. The ritual of a successful début was lacking. But it was enough for her that she had given her best to the beloved audience of one. The memory of that evening would be a little shrine where she would go sometimes and burn the slender candle of her talent. There she would find inspiration in the recollection of her part in the drama of Grandpère's quiet passing. With that thought in mind, she knew she would never again fail to put the "heart" into her work.

She held the handkerchief smelling of eau de Cologne pressed close to her cheek and went away, full of tears, but with a new courage.

E

W

REMEMBER-You and I whose childhood was spent among fictive personages other than Rollo and Little Womencertain limp weeklies done in chrome and scarlet, hypodermic to pulse and appetite, but definitely ruinous to the literary digestion. Who wrote them, we never learned; and what necessity inspired their composition, we never cared to determine. To us, simple ownership was the prime consideration; to procure a dime, the dime that would give us title to "Old King Brady and the Bullion Burglars," was the business of our days. Pockets pleasantly heavy with pennies wangled from junk-men in exchange for magnesia bottles-miraculous bottles that turned the sun a cuprous blue when held to the eye —we scudded to a smelly, low-ceiled shop kept by a Shiloh veteran, and tremulously demanded "the one in the window about King Brady." Then, half-paralyzed with dread of discovery by our tattlingest sister, we sidled furtively into the tool-shed, and there on a heap of shavings prostrated ourselves before the Deity of the Dime Novel.

But the Royal Brady, although a solid favorite, was by no means the only denizen of this ten-cent paradise of adventure and spotted intrigue.

An accurate census is now impossible, but even the merest hit-or-miss cataloguing must include such prominent citizens as Stan Steadfast, Seth Jones, Jack Harkaway, Frank and Dick Merriwell, and the perennial Nick Carter. Each hero claimed his coterie, and in the salons of the day

salvaged chicken-coops, parental attics and woodsheds-each tasted a transient supremacy. But somehow we managed to avoid permanent idols, and by eclectic readings snatched from the hands of our literary friends, we achieved a scope unhampered by narrow prejudice. short, we read them all.

In

Yet to say we "read" is to create false notions as to our rate of consumption. Who, reminiscent of rainy mornings in the tool-shed, will claim that he did anything but gulp and turn pages? Neither style nor subject-matter lent itself to a coldly dispassionate analysis. If by any chance a page of Meredith or Proust had strayed into a dime thriller, we would have demanded our money back. What we wanted—and got— was physical action pitched to snapping intensity: no psychologizing or stylistic flummery, if you please. Essentially, the dime novel diction of a thousand sweating hacks can be reduced to this formula: "Luke

struck Nick. Nick shot Luke." Going over the old thrillers now, one finds by actual count that few sentences contain more than eight more than eight words, with a fistful of robustious verbs in every line. These verbs (I select at random from "Fancy Frank of Colorado") were usually dart, plunge, leap, swing, shoot and crash. And at the end of every chapter the author, fearful lest his action lag, would season our jaded fancies with a sauce of active-voiced condiments, thus:

"Fancy Frank whipped out his Colt. Still sneering, the gambler called Frank a vile name.

"Frank's trigger finger itched, but he said, 'Get up and we'll shoot square.' [Watch the sentence-pattern, stiff as frozen corduroy.]

"Suddenly, like the treacherous snake he was, the gambler made a false move towards his hip.

"Frank fired twice.

"The gambler pitched forward. He was dead as a stone. Frank had shot him through both lungs."

Not exactly a heart depressant, you'll agree.

22

And deader than the gambler with Frank's bullet through his lung, is the dime novel itself. In company with herdics and antimacassars it molders in an unmarked grave, and not even the wisest may tell of its last hours. Unquestionably, here is a thesis for some unconventional Ph.D. candidate. Such a thesis might undertake to develop (after the suggestion of Professor Blandwell, the Departmental Head) the evolution of the dime novel from the sixteenth century novella through the Gothic horror story of Monk Lewis

or Mrs. Radcliffe-not forgetting to indicate, of course, certain eighteenth century ballad-sheets and broadsides, especially those dealing with gallows-confessions and the lives of notorious highwaymen. A good man with an academic pickand-shovel should uncover whole acres of material. Scholarly categories might easily be erected; species labeled and divided into subspecies, for example: I. Frontier Type. (1) Cowboys and Indians, (a) Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull, General Custer. (2) Trappers and Prospectors, (a) Kit Carson, (b) Fol-de-rol-dol and so on. Oh, there is literary capital in the dime novel, and if some academic entrepreneur wants to pick it up he has my permission to string it out gratis as far as it will go.

But for my own delight I have always preferred always preferred to walk down Third Avenue, New York (weakly resisting pawnshop displays of handcuffs, black-jacks and brass-knuckles that insist on being handled) and enter a dilapidated book-stall on the corner of Eighth Street. Here at various times I have found all the second-hand dime novels in the world, heaped ceiling high, waiting pitifully for buyers at a penny apiece. You pick one up gingerly; dust and brown age have dimmed the eyesearing cover-pigments; perhaps the cover itself is missing. No matter; you pick one up, making a mental note: "wash hands thoroughly before dinner." And promptly you forget both dust and dinner, for here are spread before you the friends of your youth: "Buffalo Bill's Last Shot," "Night-Hawk Kit," "Iron-Armed Abe" and "Fred Fearnot's Winning Spurt." Burrow deeper into the pile

and you pull out "Velvet Foot, the Indian Detective," "Captain Mystery," and "Arizona Joe," subtitled "The Boy Pard of Texas Jack." How the titles renew memories of truant days and coal-oil nights, dustier than the yellowed volumes themselves.

Industrious boring into the mass may uncover a stray copy of "Golden Hours," a sixteen page, five cent magazine published in New York every Saturday during the seventies and eighties by a George Munro of Vandewater Street. This yellowcovered, weirdly illustrated magazine contained some of the grisliest tales ever told in English. I vaguely remember one in which an ignis fatuus in the form of a human skeleton led the hero and his friends through a haunted everglade in search of gold. This tale was unraveled by A. W. Aiken, a noble hack who for fifteen years wrote three novels a month. When under pressure, Aiken could write a thirtythousand word novel in a week. Many authors thought five thousand words a day was a leisurely pace. Colonel Prentiss Ingraham once turned out a complete novel in twenty-four hours. (Shades of Flaubert! Why all this racket about the mot juste?)

But no search, however diligent, will uncover one of the original Beadle books, first published by Erastus Beadle in 1860. Beadle is the Watt and the Magellan of the dime novel. His ideas blew the lid off the literary kettle, and his papercovered novels circumnavigated the reading globe. Beadle was publishing almanacs and game-books in Buffalo when he conceived the notion

of dime literature. He believed that he could get authors to grind out thirty-thousand word novels (at a half-cent a word), print them cheaply, and dispose of them in bales to the youth of a nation who were languishing for reading matter that was at once hectic and inexpensive. ("McGuffey's Reader" and "Sandford and Merton" were, after all, pretty sorry provender.) So the enterprising Mr. Beadle established himself at 141 Williams Street, New York, and gathered about his whirring presses the most competent and entertaining school of feuilletonistes that ever ground out copy. Even the Dumas factory could not have competed in volume and financial success with Beadle's marvelous fiction-mill.

Orville J. Victor was general editor of the Beadle Dime Pocket Library, as the series was called. And from the accounts that filter down to us, Orville Victor must have been a remarkable fellow. He had already done some excellent journalistic editing before joining the Beadle staff, and was known to American letters as one of the leading contributors to "Graham's Magazine." For the first ten years of Victor's editorship a high standard of literary excellence was maintained. Lincoln, Seward and Henry Ward Beecher were among Beadle's most illustrious patrons; the Federal Government shipped Beadle's novels by the train-load to the armies of the North. "As editor," said Victor to a friend, "I sought the best work of the best writers. I laid down strict rules of morality, probability and action that all Beadle authors were bound to observe. . American frontier life at that time was a colorful arena of warring