distinctive flavor in American humor is that of the grotesque. It is characteristic in Mark Twain's best work, and it is characteristic of most of those others who have won fame as purveyors of laughter. The American tourist brags of his own:

   "Talk of Vesuve—huh! Niag'll put her out in three minutes." That polished writer, Irving, did not hesitate to declare that Uncle Sam believed the earth tipped when he went West. In the archives of our government is a state paper wherein President Lincoln referred to Mississippi gunboats with draught so light that they would float wherever the ground was a little damp. Typically American in its grotesquerie was the assertion of a rural humorist who asserted that the hogs

   thereabout were so thin they had to have a knot tied in their tails to prevent them from crawling through the chinks in the fence.

   Ward displayed the like quality amusingly in his remark to the conductor of a tediously slow-moving accommodation train in the South. From his seat in the solitary passenger coach behind the long line of freight cars, he addressed the official with great seriousness:

   "I ask you, conductor, why don't you take the cow-catcher off the engine and put it behind the car here? As it is now, there ain't a thing to hinder a cow from strolling into a car and biting a passenger."

   Similar extravagance appears in another story of a crawling train. The conductor demanded a ticket from a baldheaded old man whose face was mostly hidden in a great mass of white whiskers.

   "I give it to ye," declared the ancient.

   "I don't reckon so," the conductor answered. "Where did you get on?"

   "At Perkins' Crossin'," he of the hoary beard replied.

   The conductor shook his head emphatically.

   "Wasn't anybody got aboard at Perkins' Crossin' 'cept one little boy."

   "I," wheezed the aged man, "was that little boy."

   In like fashion, we tell of a man so tall that he had to go up on a ladder to shave himself—and down cellar to put his boots on.

   We Americans are good-natured, as is necessary for humor, and we have brains, as is necessary for wit, and we have the vitality that makes creation easy, even inevitable. So there is never any dearth 

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