"I am haunted, haunted by a foul fiend. He meets me at six, P.M., in our festive dining-room, and the fork or spoon drops from my nerveless grasp. He follows me up to the parlor, where I sometimes talk of an evening to Miss Pipkin (Miss P. is our fourth story, front), and I become silent in his presence, and Pipkin votes me a bore. He sits by my side when I am playing at whist, and I trump my partner's trick, and the dear old game becomes disgusting. He even dared once to follow me into church, but I cried 'Avaunt!' in a tone so peremptory, that he fled for a moment. He joined me, however, as soon as service was over, and walked from Tenth Street to Madison Square, with his grizzly arm thurst through mine, and his diabolical jeers drumming on my tympana. In dreams he perches on my breast, and clutches me by the throat. "Like the arch fiend, he assumes many shapes. He is now a tall man, and again a short man; sometimes young and audacious, sometimes old and leering. He only once took a feminine guise: that blessed form was irksome to him. He prefers the freedom of masculinity and ineffables. He was once a bookkeeper like myself; then a young attorney; then a medical student; then a bald-headed old gentleman, who seemed to blow a flageolet for a living; and lately, he has taken the shape of a well-to-do President of 'The Arkansas and Arizona Sky Rocket Transportation Company,' but through all these shifting shapes, I recognize him and shudder. "He is known as the Funny Fellow. "Very glorious are wit and humor. I have heard many eminent lecturers discourse on the distinctions, definitions, and value of these airy good gifts. I remember being especially edified by the skill with which Spout, the eloquent, dissected the philosophy of mirth in the same style and with the same effect that the boy in the story dissected his grandmamma's bellows to see how the wind was raised. I agree with Spout that wit and humor are glorious; that satire, pricking the balloons of conceit, vain glory, and hypocrisy, is invaluable; that a good laugh can come only from a warm heart; that the man in motley is often wiser than the judge in ermine or the priest in lawn. These qualities are goodly in literature. We all love the kindly humorist from Chaucer to Holmes, inclusive. How genial and gentle they are, as they sit with us around the fireside, chucking us under the chins, and slyly poking us in the ribs; and in the field how nobly they have charged upon humbugs and shams. They have been true knights, chivalrous, kind-hearted, brave, religious; their spears are slender, perhaps, yet sharp and elastic as the blades of Toledo; and as they have galloped up and down in the lists, gaily caparisoned and cheery, it has done our hearts good to see how they have hurled into the dust the pompous, sleepy champions of error and hypocrisy.