A finer appreciation of contrasts, and of relations generally, will often serve to enrich the impression given by a palpable instance of the laughable. A small plump child falls on the floor with sonorous effect: the sudden flopping down is fraught with entertainment for all men. The observer who can contemplate thoughtfully, enjoys the fall also, but more quietly and with a larger process of mental assimilation. His mind discerns in the trivial incident such things, perhaps, as the compact sturdiness of nature re-establishing itself by vigorous efforts duly announced by grunts, and the harmlessness of falls when bones and joints are young, as compared with those of the old, of which in many respects the child’s fall may remind him. It is a train of ideas of this kind, though only half-consciously pursued, which gives to the thumping fall much of its value for the humorous observer. {303} Again, the development of the intelligence to a large and varied activity will, by quickening the faculty of seizing relations, open up new and spacious fields for the humorist’s quiet contemplation. To one bringing a mental eye focussed for the amusing juxtaposition, and a temper disposed to muse on what he sees, how much of the entertaining may reveal itself in common sights, such as that of a thin wheezy man joining in shouts of a full-blooded Jingo crowd, or that of a woman, whose head has just been pommelled by her rightful lord, turning upon and “slanging” the bystander who has foolishly tried to curb an excessive assertion of marital rights.[258] The possession of ideas, again, will help a man at once sympathetically to realise and to transcend limited points of view when they come into collision, and so to gather much ruminating amusement. How large a scope, for example, for such quiet entertainment opens up in the rejoinder of Mrs. Flynn, an Irish lady who had been brought before a magistrate for assaulting her husband, and commiserated by that compassionate functionary on her sad plight with one eye closed and the head bandaged: “Och, yer worship, just wait till yez see Flynn”. The recognition of the real proportions of a zest for battle and a taste for compassion in the stalwart Irish dame, unsuspected by kindly magistrates, at once gives us the point of view for a half-serious, half-amusing contemplation of human relations.