I'll say this much for him: He certainly is hard to kill. He can
stay out all night in those clothes, with the thermometer below
zero, and at dawn still be able to chirp the only word that is
left in his vocabulary. He can't last forever though. There has
to be a finish to this lamentable fiasco sometime. We get it:

A traveler, by the faithful hound,
Half buried in the snow was found,
Still grasping in his hand of ice
That banner with the strange device,
Excelsior!

There in the twilight cold and gray,
Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay,
And from the sky serene and far,
A voice fell, like a falling star,
Excelsior!

The meteoric voice said "Excelsior!" It should have said "Bonehead!"
It would have said it, too, if Ned Buntline had been handling the
subject, for he had a sense of verities, had Ned. Probably that
was one of the reasons why they barred his works out of all the
schoolbooks.

With the passage of years I rather imagine that Lieutenant G-----,
of the United States Navy, who went to so much trouble and took
so many needless pains in order to become a corpse may have vanished
from the school readers. I admit I failed to find him in any of
the modern editions through which I glanced, but I am able to
report, as a result of my researches, that the well-known croupe