The laughter of these uninstructed people grows loud when the clever white man fails to achieve one of their own simple accomplishments. More particularly, his inability to pronounce the sounds of their language seems to be a prolific source of merriment. The Tasmanians, writes one whom we have quoted more than once, often laughed to splitting when, wishing to repeat their words, “I made mistakes or pronounced them badly”.[190] Another traveller, speaking of the natives of the West Coast of Vancouver’s Island, writes: “That they had some standard of correct speech is evident from the readiness of the children to ridicule a stranger who mispronounces native words”.[191] A third example comes from Borneo. The girls, a visitor reports, made Europeans repeat sentences of their language after them, and burst out into loud laughter “either at our pronunciation or at the {241} comical things they had made us utter”.[192] Nothing, perhaps, more clearly exhibits the ludicrous value of the violation of a perfectly uniform custom than a mispronunciation of language.[193] Nor is this all. It seems absurd to a savage, just as it does to an average English child, that the foreigner should fail to do what seems to him not merely to require no effort, but to be something one cannot help doing, like laughing itself or crying. No doubt some feeling of superiority to the foreign ignoramus enters into the enjoyment here. Perhaps the children of Vancouver’s Island felt this superiority most of all. In some cases, however, we are distinctly told that the ineptitude of Europeans, when it provokes laughter, calls out also the soothing accompaniment of kindly encouragement.