before all
else"--and this impressively--"he must possess a sense of humor." Samuel
McChord Crothers says that were he on the examining board for the
granting of certificates to prospective teachers, he would place a copy
of Lamb's essay on Schoolmasters in the hands of each, and if the light
of humorous appreciation failed to dawn as the reading progressed, the
certificate would be withheld. For, before all else, a teacher must
possess a sense of humor! If it be true, then, that the sense of humor
is so important in determining the choice of a profession, how wise are
those writers who hold it an essential for entrance into that most
exacting of professions--matrimony! "Incompatibility in humor," George
Eliot held to be the "most serious cause of diversion." And Stevenson,
always wise, insists that husband and wife must he able to laugh over
the same jokes--have between them many a "grouse in the gun-room" story.
But there must always be exceptions if the spice of life is to be
preserved, and I recall one couple of my acquaintance, devoted and loyal
in spite of this very incompatibility. A man with a highly whimsical
sense of humor had married a woman with none. Yet he told his best
stories with an eye to their effect on her, and when her response came,
peaceful and placid and non-comprehending, he would look about the table
with delight, as much as to say, "Isn't she a wonder? Do you know her
equal?"

Humor may be the greatest of the virtues, yet it is the one of whose
possession we may boast with impunity. "Well, that was too much for my
sense of humor," we say. Or, "You know my sense of humor was always my
strong point." Imagine thus boasting of one's integrity, or sense of
honor! And so is its lack the one vice of which one may not permit
himself to be a trifle proud. "I admit that I have a hot temper," and "I
know I'm extravagant," are simple enough admissions. But did any one
ever openly make the confession, "I know I am lacking in a sense of
humor!" However, to recognize the lack one would first have to possess
the sense--which is manifestly impossible.

"To explain the nature of laughter and tears is to account for the
condition of human life," says Hazlitt, and no philosophy has as yet
succeeded in accounting for the condition of human life. "Man is a
laughing animal," wrote Meredith, "and at the end of infinite search the
philosopher finds himself clinging to laughter as the best of human
fruit, purely hum