On the other hand I think unconsciousness and want of intention, or at least the pretense of it, is more or less essential to the ludicrous. For this reason what may be called the wit of events is always ludicrous. Nothing can be more so, for example, than the Pope’s sending a Cardinal’s hat to John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, which arrived in England after Henry VIII had taken off that prelate’s head. So, when Dr. Johnson said very gravely one day, that he had _often thought_ that if he had a harem he would dress all the ladies in white linen, the unintentional incongruity of the speech with the character of the great moralist threw Boswell into an ecstasy of laughter. Like this is the ludicrousness of Pope Paul III writing to the Council of Trent “that they should begin with original sin, observing yet a due respect unto the Emperor.” Captain Basil Hall, when he traveled in this country, found the Yankees a people entirely destitute of wit and humor. Perhaps our gravity, which ought to have put him on the right scent, deceived him. I do not know a more perfect example of wit than something which, as I have heard, was said to the captain himself. Stopping at a village inn there came up a thunderstorm, and Captain Hall, surprised that a new country should have reached such perfection in these meteorological manufactures, said to a bystander, “Why, you have very heavy thunder here.” “Well, yes,” replied the man, “we _du_, considerin’ the number of inhabitants.” Here is another story which a stage-driver told me once. A wag on the outside of the coach called to a man by the roadside who was fencing some very poor land: “I say, mister, what are you fencing that pasture for? It would take forty acres on’t to starve a middle-sized cow.” “Jesso; and I’m a-fencing of it to keep eour kettle eout.” Now in the “forty acre” part of this story we have an instance of what is called American exaggeration, and which I take to be the symptom of most promise in Yankee fun. For it marks that desire for intensity of expression which is one phase of imagination. Indeed many of these sayings are purely imaginative; as where a man said of a painter he knew, that “he painted a shingle so exactly like marble that when it fell into the river it sunk.” A man told me once that the people of a certain town were so universally dishonest that “they had to take in their stone walls at night.” In some of these stories imagination appears yet more strongly, and in that contradictory union with the understanding lies at the root of highest humor. For example, a coachman driving up some steep mountains in Vermont was asked if they were as steep on the other side also. “Steep! chain-lightnin’ couldn’t go down ’em without the breechin’ on.” I believe that there is more latent humor among the American people than in any other, and that it will one day develop itself and find expression through Art.