he flash.

Perhaps the Americans themselves are just a little too sure of their
superiority to the English in point of humour, and indeed they often
carry their witticisms on the supposed English "obtuseness" to a point
at which exaggeration ceases to be funny. It is certainly not every
American who scoffs at English wit that is entitled to do so. There
are dullards in the United States as well as elsewhere; and nothing
can well be more ghastly than American humour run into the ground. On
the other hand their sense of loyalty to humour makes them much more
free in using it at their own expense; and some of their stories show
themselves up in the light usually reserved for John Bull. I
remember, unpatriotically, telling a stock story (to illustrate the
English slowness to take a joke) to an American writer whose pictures
of New England life are as full of a delicate sense of humour as they
are of real and simple pathos. It was, perhaps, the tale of the London
bookseller who referred to his own coiffure the American's remark
apropos of the two-volume English edition of a well-known series of
"Walks in London"--"Ah, I see you part your _Hare_ in the middle."
Whatever it was, my hearer at once capped it by the reply of a Boston
girl to her narration of the following anecdote: A railway conductor,
on his way through the cars to collect and check the tickets, noticed
a small hair-trunk lying in the forbidden central gangway, and told
the old farmer to whom it apparently belonged that it must be moved
from there at once. On a second round he found the trunk still in the
passage, reiterated his instructions more emphatically, and passed on
without listening to the attempted explanations of the farmer. On his
third round he cried: "Now, I gave you fair warning; here goes;" and
tipped the trunk overboard. Then, at last, the slow-moving farmer
found utterance and exclaimed: "All right! the trunk is none o' mine!"
To which the Boston girl: "Well, whose trunk was it?" We agreed, _nem.
con._, that this was indeed _Anglis ipsis Anglior_.

These remarks as to the comparative merits of English and American
humour must be understood as referring to the average man in each
case--the "Man on the Cars," as our cousins have it. It would be a
very different position, and one hardly tenable, to maintain that the
land of Mark Twain has produced greater literary humorists than the
land of Charles Lamb. In the matter of comic papers it may also