An English Reader has for half a century been in use in French schools, which gives Sam Slick’s chapter on “Buying a Horse” as one of its samples of classical English literature. Experience is proving that the value attached by Sam Slick to the geographical position and natural advantages of the Province of Nova Scotia was not a mistaken one. We are, however, apt to be more grateful to those that amuse than to those who instruct us. Many persons who laughed at Sam Slick’s jokes did not relish his truths, and his popularity as an author was far greater out of Nova Scotia than in it; but it had ceased to depend on the verdict of his countrymen. Artemus Ward pronounced him to be the “father of the American school of humor.” The illustrations of the Clockmaker by Hervieu, and of Wise Saws by Leech, supplied the conventional type of “Brother Jonathan,” or “Uncle Sam,” with his shrewd smile, his long hair, his goatee, his furry hat, and his short striped trousers held down by long straps, a precise contrast to the conventional testy, pompous, pot-bellied John Bull, with his knee-breeches and swallow-tail coat. Among all the numerous notices of Sam Slick’s works that have appeared from time to time, that by the _Illustrated London News_, on July 15th, 1842, which was accompanied by an excellent portrait of Judge Haliburton, is the most discriminating and appreciative. “Sam Slick’s _entrée_ into the literary world would appear to have been in the columns of a weekly Nova Scotian journal, in which he wrote seven or eight years ago a series of sketches illustrative of homely American character. There was no name attached to them, but they soon became so popular that the editor of the _Nova Scotian_ newspaper applied to the author for permission to reprint them entire; and this being granted, he brought them out in a small, unpretending duodecimo volume, the popularity of which, at first confined to our American colonies, soon spread over the United States, by all classes of whose inhabitants it was most cordially welcomed. At Boston, at New York, at Philadelphia, at Baltimore, in short, in all the leading cities and towns of the Union, this anonymous little volume was to be found on the drawing-room tables of the most influential members of the social community; while, even in the emigrant’s solitary farm house and the squatter’s log hut among the primeval forests of the Far West, it was read with the deepest interest, cheering the spirits of the backwoodsman by its wholesome, vigorous and lively pictures of every-day life. A recent traveller records his surprise and pleasure at meeting with a well-thumbed copy in a log hut in the woods of the Mississippi valley.