"And did he thrash you?"

   "Marsa John? No, sah. He laughed loud as anybody; an' den dat night he says to me as I was puttin' some wood on de fire:

   "'Chad, where did dat leg go?' An' so I ups an' tells him all about Henny, an' how I was lyin' 'case I was 'feared de gal would git hurt, an' how she was on'y a-foolin', thinkin' it was my goose; an' den de ole marsa look in de fire for a long time, an' den he says:

   "'Dat's Colonel Barbour's Henny, ain't it, Chad?'

   "'Yes, marsa,' says I.

   "Well, de next mawnin' he had his black horse saddled, an' I held the stirrup for him to git on, an' he rode ober to de Barbour plantation, an' didn't come back till plumb black night. When he come up I held de lantern so I could see his face, for I wa'n't easy in my mine all day. But it was all bright an' shinin' same as a' angel's.

   "'Chad,' he says, handin' me de reins, 'I bought yo' Henny dis arternoon from Colonel Barbour, an' she's comin' ober to-morrow, an' you can bofe git married next Sunday.'"

   Perhaps unconscious humor does not appeal to the more amiable side of our sense of mirth, for it excites in us a conceited feeling of superiority over those who are making us laugh,—but its unexpectedness and infinite variety render it irresistible to a certain class of minds. The duly labeled "joke" follows a certain law and rule; whereas no jester could invent the

    grotesqueries

   of the unconscious humorist.

   As a humble gleaner after the editorial scythe,—or, to be truly modern, I should say mowing-machine,—I have gathered some strange sheaves of this sort of humor. Like many provincial newspapers, that to which I am attached makes a feature of printing the social happenings in villages of the surrounding country, and these out-of-town correspondents "don't do a thing to" the English language. One of them invariably refers to the social lights of his vicinity as "our prominent socialists," and describes some individual as "happening to an accident." To another, every festal occasion is "a bower of beauty and a scene of fairyland." Blue-penciling they resent, and one of them wrote to complain that a descriptive effort of his had been "much altered and deranged." The paper also publishes portraits of children and young women, and it is in the descriptions accompanying these pictures that the rural 

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