own in many distinctive features. Thus, there is a Canadian story that might just as well have originated below the line, of an Irish girl, recently imported, who visited her clergyman and inquired his fee for marrying. He informed her that his charge was two dollars. A month later, the girl visited the clergyman for the second time, and at once handed him two dollars, with the crisp direction, "Go ahead and marry me."

   "Where is the bridegroom?" the clergyman asked.

   "What!" exclaimed the girl, dismayed. "Don't you furnish him for the two dollars?"

   It would seem that humor is rather more enjoyable to the British taste than wit, though there is, indeed, no lack of the latter. But the people delight most in absurd situations that appeal to the risibilities without any injury to the feelings of others. For example,

   Dickens relates an anecdote concerning two men, who were about to be hanged at a public execution. When they were already on the scaffold in preparation for the supreme moment, a bull being led to market broke loose and ran amuck through the great crowd assembled to witness the hanging. One of the condemned men on the scaffold turned to his fellow, and remarked:

   "I say, mate, it's a good thing we're not in that crowd."

   In spite of the gruesome setting and the gory antics of the bull, the story is amusing in a way quite harmless. Similarly, too, there is only wholesome amusement in the woman's response to a vegetarian, who made her a proposal of marriage. She did, not mince her words:

   "Go along with you! What? Be flesh of your flesh, and you a-living on cabbage? Go marry a grass widow!"

   The kindly spirit of British humor is revealed even in sarcastic jesting on the domestic relation, which, on the contrary, provokes the bitterest jibes of the Latins. The shortest of jokes, and perhaps the most famous, was in the single word of

    Punch's

   advice to those about to get married:

   "Don't!"

   The like good nature is in the words of a woman who was taken to a hospital in the East End of London. She had been shockingly beaten, and the attending surgeon was moved to pity for her and indignation against her assailant.

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