Moreover while Lord de Viperous is being thus cowed by Madeline the Heroine, he is also being “dogged” by the Hero.  This counterpart of Madeline who shared her popularity for fifty years can best be described as the Long-winded Immaculate Hero.  Entirely blameless in his morals, and utterly virtuous in his conduct, he possessed at least one means of defending himself.  He could make speeches.  This he did on all occasions.  With these speeches he “dogged” Lord de Viperous.  Here is the style of them:—­

“‘My Lord,’ said Markham...” (incidentally let it be explained that this particular brand of hero was always known by his surname and his surname was always Markham) —­“’My lord, the sentiments that you express and the demeanour which you have evinced are so greatly at variance with the title that you bear and the lineage of which you spring that no authority that you can exercise and no threats that you are able to command shall deter me from expressing that for which, however poor and inadequate my powers of speech, all these of whom and for what I am what I am, shall answer to it for the integrity of that, which, whether or not, is at least as it is.  My lord, I have done.  Or shall I speak more plainly still?’”

Is it to be wondered that after this harangue Lord Rip sank into a chair, a hideous convulsion upon his face, murmuring—­“It is enough.”

But successful as they were as Hero and Heroine, Markham and Madeline presently passed off the scene.  Where they went to, I do not know.  Perhaps Markham got elected in the legislature of Massachusetts.  At any rate they disappeared from fiction.

There followed in place of Madeline, the athletic sunburned heroine with the tennis racket.  She was generally called Kate Middleton, or some such plain, straightforward designation.  She wore strong walking boots and leather leggings.  She ate beef steak.  She shot with a rifle.  For a while this Boots and Beef Heroine (of the middle nineties) made a tremendous hit.  She climbed crags in the Rockies.  She threw steers in Colorado with a lariat.  She came out strong in sea scenes and shipwrecks, and on sinking steamers, where she “cowed” the trembling stewards and “dogged” the mutinous sailors in the same fashion that Madeline used to “cow” and “dog” Lord Rip de Viperous.

With the Boots and Beef Heroine went as her running mate the out-of-doors man, whose face had been tanned and whose muscles had been hardened into tempered steel in wild rides over the Pampas of Patagonia, and who had learned every art and craft of savage life by living among the wild Hoodoos of the Himalayas.  This Air-and-Grass-man, as he may be called, is generally supposed to write the story...  He was “I” all through.  And he had an irritating modesty in speaking of his own prowess.  Instead of saying straight out that he was the strongest and bravest man in the world, he implied it indirectly on every page.

Here, for example, is a typical scene in which “I” and Kate figure in a desperate adventure in the Rocky Mountains, pursued by Indians.