Sketches” (1884), and “Daddy Jake, the Runaway” (1889). _The Boisterous Humourists._--Turning now to the “boisterous school” of American humour, we may dwell for a time upon the chief characteristics exhibited by members of the group. In the first place, most of them have forgotten how to spell. There is something ludicrous in the appearance of the word “through” masquerading in the garb “thru,” whatever may be the plea of the society of spelling reformers to the contrary; and certainly no one, except a school-teacher, can be other than amused to see such common words as “laugh,” “feel,” “funny,” and the like making their bows as “laff,” “feal,” and “phuny.” Laughable as this may be, however, it is not too much to insist that, if the appeal is only to the eye, if the wit evaporates when the words are not seen but merely heard, then the humour is not of very high order. In the second place, most of the members of the boisterous school, along with their loss of power as spellers, have also forgotten how to tell the truth. “This inclination towards outrageous exaggeration,” said Lowell, “is a prime characteristic of American humour.” “There is,” he says elsewhere, “something irresistibly comic in the conception of a negro so black that charcoal made a white mark on him, or in the idea of a soil so fertile that a nail planted in it becomes a railroad spike before morning.” This example of untruthfulness might also be taken as an illustration of the third trait of the group now under discussion--that of producing the most absurd paradoxes and of bringing into juxtaposition the most diverse uses of the same word. This is more than mere word-play; it is rather what might be termed the apotheosis of the pun. It underlies the majority of jokes that are found in the American newspaper, and is at once the admiration and the despair of those who try to analyse or to imitate the subtlety of our humour.