He glanced over the first column [of Phoenix's _Pictorial_] when he was observed to grow black in the face. A bystander hastened to seize him by the collar, but it was too late. Exploding with mirth, he was scattered into a thousand fragments, one of which striking him probably inflicting some fatal injury, as he immediately expired, having barely time to remove his hat, and say in a feeble voice, "Give this to Phoenix." A large black tooth lies on the table before us, driven through the side of the office with fearful violence at the time of the explosion. We have enclosed it to his widow with a letter of condolence. "_Truthful James_"--we think of Bret Harte, and we think of him again after passages like this: "An old villain with a bald head and spectacles punched me in the abdomen; I lost my breath, closed my eyes, and remembered nothing further." Derby was the first conspicuous writer to use grotesque exaggerations deliberately and freely as a provocative of laughter. Irving and many others had made use of it, but in _Phoenixiana_ it amounts to a mannerism. He tells the most astonishing impossibilities and then naïvely adds: "It is possible that the circumstances may have become slightly exaggerated. Of course, there can be no doubt of the truth of the main incidents." In true California style he makes use often of specific exaggeration. Two men trip over a rope in the dark "and then followed what, if published, would make two closely printed royal octavo pages of profanity." So popular was the Phoenix _Herald_ that "we have now seven hundred and eighty-two Indians employed night and day in mixing adobe for the type molds." The second characteristic of Derby's humor was its irreverence. To him nothing was sacred. The first practical joker, he averred, was Judas Iscariot: he _sold_ his Master. Arcturus, he observed, was a star "which many years since a person named Job was asked if he could guide, and he acknowledged he couldn't do it." "David was a Jew--hence, the 'Harp of David' was a Jew's-harp." He delights in the device of euphemistic statement used so freely by later humorists. The father of Joseph Bowers, he explains, was engaged in business as a malefactor in western New York, but was annoyed greatly by the prejudices of the bigoted settlers. He emigrated suddenly, however, with such precipitation in fact that "he took nothing with him of his large property but a single shirt, which he happened to have about him at the time he formed his resolution." Finally he "ended his career of usefulness by falling from a cart in which he had been standing, addressing a numerous audience, and in which fall he unfortunately broke his neck."