The Librarian at Play. Edmund Lester Pearson

He fell with a crash when the steeple came down, or disappeared forever in the angry, swirling waters, or was ground under the wheels of the locomotive—but then there was a grave for the heroine to strew violets upon, in the last chapter.

      The miser, too, has utterly disappeared. In facial characteristics he resembled the faithful old family servant, except that he had deeper lines on his brow. He liked to get out a table, and sit over it with a bag of gold.

      No banks for him.

      He wanted his gold pieces near at hand, so that he could fetch them out at any hour, clink them together and gloat over them.

      He was a clinker and a gloater—he cared for nothing else.

      We do not have any misers now. Or, if they exist, they go away to a safety deposit vault, get their bonds and gloat over them. Half the fun is gone, you see. You can gloat over bonds as much as you like, but not a clink can you get out of them. That probably accounts for the disappearance of misers.

      We earnestly request some novelist to bring about a resurrection of these characters. They would be welcome in the short stories, as well. During the past fifteen years American fiction has gone through two epochs—the Gadzooks school and the B'Gosh school.

      It is now congealed in what may be called the Ten Below Zero School. Any constant reader of the magazines has to keep on his ulster, ear-tabs, mittens and gum-shoes, from one year's end to another. It never thaws. Loggers, miners, trappers, explorers—any kind of persons so long as they dwell in the frozen north—are what the magazine writer adores.

      One of Kipling's characters says that there's never a law of God or man runs north of 53. The magazine editors seem to think there's never a thing worth writing of, lives south of 85. Will not some of them dig up one or two of the old characters we have been discussing, and see if they cannot send the thermometer up a few degrees?

      We are tired of stamping our feet, blowing on our hands, and rubbing snow on our noses to keep them from falling off.