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.

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