ist. My own experience is exactly the other
way. The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and
figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific
treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry
into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write
something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an
arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few
and far between. Personally, I would sooner have written "Alice in
Wonderland" than the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica.

In regard to the present work I must disclaim at once all intentions of
trying to do anything so ridiculously easy as writing about a real place
and real people. Mariposa is not a real town. On the contrary, it is
about seventy or eighty of them. You may find them all the way from Lake
Superior to the sea, with the same square streets and the same maple
trees and the same churches and hotels, and everywhere the sunshine of
the land of hope.

Similarly, the Reverend Mr. Drone is not one person but about eight or
ten. To make him I clapped the gaiters of one ecclesiastic round the
legs of another, added the sermons of a third and the character of a
fourth, and so let him start on his way in the book to pick up such
individual attributes as he might find for himself. Mullins and Bagshaw
and Judge Pepperleigh and the rest are, it is true, personal friends
of mine. But I have known them in such a variety of forms, with such
alternations of tall and short, dark and fair, that, individually,
I should have much ado to know them. Mr. Pupkin is found whenever a
Canadian bank opens a branch in a county town and needs a teller. As for
Mr. Smith, with his two hundred and eighty pounds, his hoarse voice,
his loud check suit, his diamonds, the roughness of his address and
the goodness of his heart,--all of this is known by everybody to be a
necessary and universal adjunct of the hotel business.

The inspiration of the book,--a land of hope and sunshine where little
towns spread their square streets and their trim maple trees beside
placid lakes almost within echo of the primeval forest,--is large
enough. If it fails in its portrayal of the scenes and the country that
it depicts the fault lies rather with an art that is deficient than in
an affection that is wanting.

Stephen Leacock. McGill University, June, 1912.

ONE. The Hostelry of Mr. Smith

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