Q. That is sad, very sad. He disappeared, then? A. Well, yes, in a sort of general way. We buried him. Q. BURIED him! BURIED him, without knowing whether he was dead or not? A. Oh no! Not that. He was dead enough. Q. Well, I confess that I can't understand this. If you buried him, and you knew he was dead--A. No! no! We only thought he was. Q. Oh, I see! He came to life again? A. I bet he didn't. Q. Well, I never heard anything like this. SOMEBODY was dead. SOMEBODY was buried. Now, where was the mystery? A. Ah! that's just it! That's it exactly. You see, we were twins,--defunct and I,--and we got mixed in the bath-tub when we were only two weeks old, and one of us was drowned. But we didn't know which. Some think it was Bill. Some think it was me. Q. Well, that is remarkable. What do YOU think? A. Goodness knows! I would give whole worlds to know. This solemn, this awful tragedy has cast a gloom over my whole life. But I will tell you a secret now, which I have never revealed to any creature before. One of us had a peculiar mark,--a large mole on the back of his left hand: that was ME. THAT CHILD WAS THE ONE THAT WAS DROWNED! ... etc., etc. A close examination will show us that the absurdity of this dialogue is by no means an absurdity of an ordinary type. It would disappear were not the speaker himself one of the twins in the story. It results entirely from the fact that Mark Twain asserts he is one of these twins, whilst all the time he talks as though he were a third person who tells the tale. In many of our dreams we adopt exactly the same method. V Regarded from this latter point of view, the comic seems to show itself in a form somewhat different from the one we lately attributed to it. Up to this point, we have regarded laughter as first and foremost a means of correction. If you take the series of comic varieties and isolate the predominant types at long intervals, you will find that all the intervening varieties borrow their comic quality from their resemblance to these types, and that the types themselves are so many models of impertinence with regard to society. To these impertinences society retorts by laughter, an even greater impertinence. So evidently there is nothing very benevolent in laughter. It seems rather inclined to return evil for evil.