This remark elicited the laughter which the puns failed to provoke; for Cecil was color-blind in all things relating to the American joke. The humor of _Punch_ appealed to him, and the wit of Sterne and Dean Swift; but the funny column and the paragrapher's niche of our newspapers he regarded as purely pathological phenomena. I sometimes feel that Cecil was right about this. Can the mind which continues to be charmed by these paragraphic strainings be really sound?--but this is not a dissertation. Cecil reconciled himself to his position as the local exemplification of the traditional Englishman whose trains of ideas run on the freight schedule--and was one of the most popular fellows in Lattimore. He gloried in his slavery to Antonia, and seemed to glean hope from the most sterile circumstances. It was easy to hope, in Lattimore, then. It was not many days after our talk in the park before I noticed a change for the better in Giddings, even. Just before Jim's house-warming, he came to me with something like optimism in his appearance. I started to cheer him up, and went wrong. "I'm glad to see by your cheerful looks," said I, "that the philosophy of Iago--" "Say, now!" cried he, "don't remind me of that, for Heaven's sake!" "Why, certainly not," said I, "if you object." "I do object," said he most earnestly; "why, that damned-fool philosophy may have ruined my life, you know." "Of course I know what you mean," said I; "but I'm convinced, and so are all your friends, that if you fail, it'll be your own lack of nerve, and nothing else, that you'll owe the disaster to. You should--" "I should have refrained from trampling under foot the dearest ideals of the only girl-- However, I can't talk of these things to any one, Barslow. But I have some hope now. Antonia and Josie have both been very kind lately--and say, Barslow, I see now how little foundation there is for that old gag about the women hating each other!" "I've always felt," said I, anxious to draw him out so that I might see what the conspirators had been doing, "that there's nothing in _that_ idea. But what has changed your view?" "Antonia, and Josie, and even your wife," said he, "have been keeping up a regular lobby in my behalf with Laura. They think they've got the deal plugged up now, so that she'll give me a show again, and--" "Why, surely," said I; "in my opinion, there never was any need for you to feel downcast." "Barslow," he said, with the air of a man who has endured to the limit, "you are a good fellow, but you make me tired when you talk like that. Why, four weeks ago I had no more show than a snowball in--in the crater of Vesuvius. But now I'm encouraged. These girls have been doing me good, as I just said, and I'm convinced that my series of editorials on 'The Influence of Christianity on Civilization,' in which I've given the Church the credit of being the whole thing, has helped some."