ce that
everybody else makes this same claim. Any man will admit,
if need be, that his sight is not good, or that he cannot
swim, or shoots badly with a rifle, but to touch upon
his sense of humour is to give him a mortal affront.

"No," said a friend of mine the other day, "I never go
to Grand Opera," and then he added with an air of pride,
"You see, I have absolutely no ear for music."

"You don't say so!" I exclaimed.

"None!" he went on. "I can't tell one tune from another.
I don't know _Home, Sweet Home_ from _God Save the King_.
I can't tell whether a man is tuning a violin or playing
a sonata."

He seemed to get prouder and prouder over each item of
his own deficiency. He ended by saying that he had a dog
at his house that had a far better ear for music than he
had. As soon as his wife or any visitor started to play
the piano the dog always began to howl--plaintively, he
said--as if it were hurt. He himself never did this.

When he had finished I made what I thought a harmless
comment.

"I suppose," I said, "that you find your sense of humour
deficient in the same way: the two generally go together."

My friend was livid with rage in a moment.

"Sense of humour!" he said. "My sense of humour! Me
without a sense of humour! Why, I suppose I've a keener
sense of humour than any man, or any two men, in this
city!"

From that he turned to bitter personal attack. He said
that _my_ sense of humour seemed to have withered
altogether.

He left me, still quivering with indignation.

Personally, however, I do not mind making the admission,
however damaging it may be, that there are certain forms
of so-called humour, or, at least, fun, which I am quite
unable to appreciate. Chief among these is that ancient
thing called the Practical Joke.

"You never knew McGann, did you?" a friend of mine asked
me the other day.

When I said I had never known McGann, he shook his head
with a sigh, and said:

"Ah, you should have known McGann. He had the greatest
sense of humour of any man I ever knew--always full of
jokes. I remember one night at the boarding-house where
we were, he stretched a string across the passage-way
and then rang the dinner bell. One of the boarders broke
his leg. We nearly died laughing."

"Dear me!" I said. "What a humorist! Did he often do
things like that?"

"Oh, yes, he was at them all the time. He used to put
tar in the tomato soup, and beeswax and tin-tacks on the
chairs. He was