As he lies thus one can tell, any schoolboy could tell, that he is physically made to be the very ideal of American romance. He is a man of action--young and strong--there can be little doubt he is a man of daring. What might not be done with such a man! Throw him back into the days of the early pioneers and he will turn you out another Daniel Boone. He will creep through hundreds of miles of forests, never disturbing a grass blade, and bring you back the fair daughter of the English nobleman, traveling in this country, whose daughter inadvertently went for an afternoon’s stroll in the wood and was captured by a skulking Indian; or he will shoot you a squirrel in the eye at five hundred yards with his faithful rifle, called, playfully, “Old Betsy.” Move him up a little now. Let, say Bret Harte, have him. There he is, fine and dandy. He is a gambler in a Western mining camp now, wearing a silk shirt and a Stetson hat. He will lose you a whole fortune without the bat of an eye, but his personal associates are a bit rough. He is always being seen about with Black Peg, who runs a house of prostitution, and with Silent Smith, the killer. Until, well, until one day when a New England school-teacher comes into the rough mining camp. One night she is set upon and is about to be outraged by a drunken miner. Then he, the associate of Black Peg, steps forward and shoots the miner. Ten minutes before, he was drunk and lying in the gutter, so drunk in fact that flies had been using his eyeballs as sliding places, but the danger to the school-teacher had sobered him instantly. He is a gentleman now. He offers the school-teacher his arm and they walk to her cabin discussing Emerson and Longfellow, and then our central figure of romance leaves her at her cabin door and goes to a lonely spot in the mountains. He sits down to wait until winter and the deep snows come, in order that he may freeze to death. He has realized that he loves the New England lady and is, in the language of the Far West, as set forth in all the best books, “not fitten for her.” The truth is that father, that is to say, my fanciful father, might well have been used by any one of a dozen of our American hero-makers. He is in the goods. That is the idea. In the hands of a Jack London he might have been another Sea Wolf or a musher trudging through the deep snow of the frozen North, cornering some fair virgin in an isolated cabin, only to let her off at the last moment out of respect for her dead mother, who expected something quite different of her. Then later he might have gone to Yale, and after that become a stock broker, taking daring chances with railroad stocks, married a woman who loved only the glare and shine of social life, chucked her, failed in business, gone farming, and turned out a clean man after all, say in the pages of the _Saturday Evening Post_. It could have been done.