Page:Brazilian short stories.djvu/42

 spicy vulgarity. The Brazilian adores a joke which exposes the rank stupidity of the Portuguese—the most convenient way our people have found to demonstrate by contrast, their own intelligence.

But how about the Major? Why did he not laugh at the English, German, French or Brazilian jokes? Which did he prefer?

Systematic observation and methodical exclusion of the classes of humor already found inefficient, led Pontes to discover the weak point of his stern adversary. The Major delighted in tales of Englishmen and friars. But they must be stories of both together. Separate, they were a failure. Just an old man's crankiness. At the appearance of red-faced Britishers, with cork helmets, checked clothes, formidable boots and pipes, side by side with rotund friars doting upon a hogshead of wine and revelling in femininme flesh, the Major would open his mouth and suspend his chewing like a child enticed by candy; and when the comic climax was reached, he would laugh, but without exaggeration enough to upset the equilibrium of his circulation.

Pontes with infinite patience bet on that class of fun and stuck to it. He increased the program, the spiciness, the dose of malice and systematically bombarded the Major's great artery with the fruits of his clever manipulation.

When the story was a long one, rendered so because the narrator added flourishes with a view to hiding the final climax and heightening the effect, the old man would become high-