“Honk!” says Mr. Grunt.

“I should love so much to see one of your factories.  They must be so interesting.”

“Honk!” says Mr. Grunt.  Then he turns and moves away sideways.  Into his little piggy eyes has come a fear that the lady is going to ask him to subscribe to something, or wants a block of his common stock, or his name on a board of directors.  So he leaves her.  Yet if he had known it she is probably as rich as he is, or richer, and hasn’t the faintest interest in his factories, and never intends to go near one.  Only she is fit to move and converse in polite society and Mr. Grunt is not.

2.—­Heroes and Heroines

“What are you reading?” I asked the other day of a blue-eyed boy of ten curled up among the sofa cushions.

He held out the book for me to see.

“Dauntless Ned among the Cannibals,” he answered.

“Is it exciting?” I enquired.

“Not very,” said the child in a matter-of-fact tone.  “But it’s not bad.”

I took the book from him and read aloud at the opened page.

“In a compact mass the gigantic savages rushed upon our hero, shrieking with rage and brandishing their huge clubs.  Ned stood his ground fearlessly, his back to a banana tree.  With a sweep of his cutlass he severed the head of the leading savage from his body, while with a back stroke of his dirk he stabbed another to the heart.  But resistance against such odds was vain.  By sheer weight of numbers, Ned was borne to the ground.  His arms were then pinioned with stout ropes made of the fibres of the boobooda tree.  With shrieks of exultation the savages dragged our hero to an opening in the woods where a huge fire was burning, over which was suspended an enormous caldron of bubbling oil.  ‘Boil him, boil him,’ yelled the savages, now wrought to the point of frenzy.”

“That seems fairly exciting, isn’t it?” I said.

“Oh, he won’t get boiled,” said the little boy.  “He’s the hero.”

So I knew that the child has already taken his first steps in the disillusionment of fiction.

Of course he was quite right as to Ned.  This wonderful youth, the hero with whom we all begin an acquaintance with books, passes unhurt through a thousand perils.  Cannibals, Apache Indians, war, battles, shipwrecks, leave him quite unscathed.  At the most Ned gets a flesh wound which is healed, in exactly one paragraph, by that wonderful drug called a “simple.”

But the most amazing thing about this particular hero, the boy Ned, is the way in which he turns up in all the great battles and leading events of the world.

It was Ned, for example, who at the critical moment at Gettysburg turned in his saddle to General Meade and said quietly, “General, the day is ours.”  “If it is,” answered Meade, as he folded his field glass, “you alone, Ned, have saved it.”

In the same way Ned was present at the crossing of the Delaware with Washington.  Thus:—­