One of the first forms of a reciprocal mirthful attack or bantering between classes is that between the Sexes. Savage life supplies us with clear cases of inter-sexual jocosity besides that of the teasing which, as we have seen, is a two-sided game. In a collection of sayings and stories of West Africa we find the following: A woman left her husband to look after a “pot-au-feu”. On returning she found that he had skimmed off the bubbling foam and hidden it in a calabash, naïvely supposing that this was the cream of the dish. She twits him with it and discovers to his slow wits that the savory scum has melted into nothing.[201] This {246} reminds one of many a story of the Middle Ages, and shows how wide-spread is the exposure of the male incompetence to the lash of woman’s merry wit. These jocose thrusts at the opposite sex are interesting as illustrating the differentiation of class-standards. If the male is laughed at for his bungling at the mysteries of cooking, how much more when he actually fails to keep up with the women folk in his own domain! Mr. Ling Roth, whose eye seems to have been specially focussed for records of the mirthful utterances of savages, tells us that a boat-load of women who had been gathering oysters rowed a race with a visitors’ crew and managed to beat them; whereupon there was a fine outburst of feminine hilarity and much quizzing of the men who had allowed themselves to be beaten by women.[202] Here, surely, was a touch of a higher feeling, a dim perception at least of the permanent and universal forms of the fitness of things. The clearest example, I have met with, of what we should call a dry humour is to be found in the work just quoted. It seems that a stupid old soothsayer once called together a large concourse of chiefs to deal with the problem of naming his children. These, he contended, were not properly his, but had been begotten by certain spirits (the Antus or Hantus). One of the chiefs did not enjoy having to come many miles to listen to this sort of stuff, so “he pretended in the midst of the soothsayer’s discourse to faint away, and fell back gasping for breath, kicking his legs spasmodically in the air at the same time”. This interruption brought the tedious proceedings to an end, and so saved the chief from further boredom. But this was not all: the disappointed humbug had to pay the chief {247} who had spoilt his performance some fowls as a punishment for allowing the spirits to attack him.[203] The story is instructive as illustrating the tendency, as soon as classes begin to be marked off, to score off a man of another class. Perhaps, indeed, we have in this jocose imposition on the imposer a suggestion of the merry-making of kings and peoples at the expense of the clergy which was so marked a feature in mediæval hilarity.