ability by exercising it. He should practise short and simple stories according to his opportunities, with the object of making the narration smooth and easy. An audience of one or two familiar friends is sufficient in the earlier efforts. Afterward, the practise may be extended before a larger number of listeners on social occasions. When facility has been attained in the simplest form, attempts to extend the preliminary narrative should be made. The preparation should include an effort to invest the characters of the story; or its setting, with qualities amusing in themselves, quite apart from any relation to the point. Precise instruction cannot be given, but concentration along this line will of itself develop the humorous perception of the story-teller, so that, though the task may appear too difficult in prospect, it will not prove so in actual experience. But, in every instance, care must be exercised to keep the point of the story clearly in view, and to omit nothing essential in the preparation for it.

   In the selection of stories to be retailed, it is the part of wisdom to choose the old, rather than the new. This is because the new story, so called, travels with frightful velocity under modern social conditions, and, in any particular case, the latest story, when told by you to a

   friend, has just been heard by him from some other victim of it. But the memory of most persons for stories is very short. Practically never does it last for years. So, it is uniformly safe to present as novelties at the present day the humor of past decades. Moreover, the exercise of some slight degree of ingenuity will serve to give those touches in the way of change by which the story may be brought up to date. Indeed, by such adaptation, the story is made really one's own—as the professional humorists thankfully admit!

   Wit and humor, and the distinction between them, defy precise definition. Luckily, they need none. To one asking what is beauty, a wit replied: "That is the question of a blind man." Similarly, none requires a definition of wit and humor unless he himself be lacking in all appreciation of them, and, if he be so lacking, no amount of explanation will avail to give him understanding. Borrow, in one of his sermons, declared concerning wit: "It is, indeed, a thing so versatile, multiform, appearing in so many shapes and garbs, so variously apprehended of several eyes and judgments, that it seemeth no less hard to settle a clear and certain notion thereof than to make a portrait of Proteus, or to define the figure of the fleeting wind." Nor is it fitting to attempt exact distinctions between wit and humor, which 

 Prev. P 2/289 next