Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/147

 way across the page. Laying down the pen, the man remarked, "I've been bled by St. Joe fleas, bitten by Kansas City spiders, and interviewed by Fort Scott gray-backs; but hang me if I was ever in a place where these critters looked over the register to take the number of your room."

A Western editor, culminating in his description of a tornado, said, "In short, it was a wind that just sat up on its hind legs and howled."

Some of the Texan cows have been lately described as so thin that it takes two men to see one of them. The men stand back to back, so that one says, "Here she comes!" and the other cries, "There she goes!" Thus between them both the cow is seen.

All these American instances are conceived in the pure Shakspearian blending of the understanding and the imagination. But one more of them, perhaps the most artistically perfect of all, must suffice. A coachman, driving up some mountains in Vermont, was asked by an outside passenger if they were as steep on the other side also. "Steep! Chain lightnin' couldn't go down 'em witheout the breechin' on!"

We have seen in what the comedy of Falstaff'S character consists. Its humor lies in the tolerance which his inexhaustible wile procures for his vices. We are all the time reconciled to his behavior, though in anybody else it would be outrageous,—"most tolerable and not to be borne." But such a Noachian deluge of animal spirits would carry away a bulkier man than he. It is love of fun more than villainous inclination which