“‘What do you see, Ned?’ said Washington, as they peered from the leading boat into the driving snow.

“‘Ice,’ said Ned.  ‘My boy,’ said the Great American General, and a tear froze upon his face as he spoke, ’you have saved us all.’”

Here is Ned at Runningmede when King John with his pen in hand was about to sign the Magna Carta.

“For a moment the King paused irresolute, the uplifted quill in his hand, while his crafty, furtive eyes indicated that he might yet break his plighted faith with the assembled barons.

“Ned laid his mailed hand upon the parchment.

“‘Sign it,’ he said sternly, ‘or take the consequences.’

“The King signed.

“‘Ned,’ said the Baron de Bohun, as he removed his iron vizor from his bronze face, ’thou hast this day saved all England.’”

In the stories of our boyhood in which Ned figured, there was no such thing as a heroine, or practically none.  At best she was brought in as an afterthought.  It was announced on page three hundred and one that at the close of Ned’s desperate adventures in the West Indies he married the beautiful daughter of Don Diego, the Spanish governor of Portobello; or else, at the end of the great war with Napoleon, that he married a beautiful and accomplished French girl whose parents had perished in the Revolution.

Ned generally married away from home.  In fact his marriages were intended to cement the nations, torn asunder by Ned’s military career.  But sometimes he returned to his native town, all sunburned, scarred and bronzed from battle (the bronzing effect of being in battle is always noted):  he had changed from a boy to a man:  that is, from a boy of fifteen to a man of sixteen.  In such a case Ned marries in his own home town.  It is done after this fashion: 

“But who is this who advances smiling to greet him as he crosses the familiar threshold of the dear old house?  Can this tall, beautiful girl be Gwendoline, the child-playmate of his boyhood?”

Well, can it?  I ask it of every experienced reader—­can it or can it not?

Ned had his day, in the boyhood of each of us.  We presently passed him by.  I am speaking, of course, of those of us who are of maturer years and can look back upon thirty or forty years of fiction reading.  “Ned,” flourishes still, I understand, among the children of today.  But now he flies in aeroplanes, and dives in submarines, and gives his invaluable military advice to General Joffre and General Pershing.

But with the oncoming of adolescent years something softer was needed than Ned with his howling cannibals and his fusillade of revolver shots.

So the “Ned” of the Adventure Books was supplanted by the Romantic Heroine of the Victorian Age and the Long-winded Immaculate who accompanied her as the Hero.

I do not know when these two first opened their twin career.  Whether Fenimore Cooper or Walter Scott began them, I cannot say.  But they had an undisputed run on two continents for half a century.