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 to spoil a good story. The only sensible rule is to emulate Barney McGee!

American literature is overlaid with romantic fictions which, originating in the brain of some lecturer desperately endeavoring to keep his auditors awake, or of some newspaperman hard up for a story, accumulate detail after detail as they roll along until the minute grain of fact upon which they were sometimes founded becomes hopelessly lost amid imaginative accretions. It is with such a story that the present article is concerned.

The two decades from 1870 to 1890 were chiefly remarkable for sentimental balderdash. It was the taste of the time; it is, of course, the half-baked taste of all times, but the songs that were sung in “genteel” drawing-rooms and the verse which was read and recited and widely-acclaimed amid the same surroundings touched depths of imbecility which have never since been equaled. One of the most popular of such recitations was entitled “Beautiful Snow,” and purported to be the tragic revery of an outcast as she makes her way along the wintry streets of a great city in the midst of a driving snow-storm. It was “sure-fire stuff,” especially when recited by one of the gentler sex, because to the hopeless melancholy which was once so popular in pieces of this sort it added discussion, or at least mention, of a subject strictly taboo.