The humour of that day was the humour bred of a barbaric freedom and a lawless, untrammelled life. Mark Twain grew up with a civilization but one remove from barbarism; supremacy in marksmanship was the arbiter of argument; the greatest joke was the discomfiture of a fellow-creature. In the laughter of these wild Westerners was something at once rustic and sanguinary. The refinements of art and civilization seemed effeminate, artificial, to these rude spirits, who laughed uproariously at one another, plotted dementedly in circumvention of each other's plans, and gloried in their defiance of both man and God. Deep in their hearts they cherished tenderness for woman, sympathy for the weak and the afflicted, and generosity indescribable. And yet they prided themselves upon their barbaric rusticity, glorying in a native cunning bred of their wild life and sharpened in the struggle for existence. What, after all, is 'The Jumping Frog' but the elaborate narrative, in native vernacular, of a shrewd practical joke? As Mark Twain first heard it, this story was a solemn recital of an interesting incident in the life of Angel's Camp. It was Mark Twain who “created” the story: he endowed with the comic note of whimsicality that imaginative realization of _une chose vue_, which went round the world. The humour of rustic shrewdness in criticism of art, so elaborately exploited in 'The Innocents Abroad', was displayed, perhaps invented, by Mark Twain in the early journalistic days in San Francisco. In 'The Golden Era' an excellent example is found in the following observations upon a celebrated painting of Samson and Delilah, then on exhibition in San Francisco: “Now what is the first thing you see in looking at this picture down at the Bank Exchange? Is it the gleaming eye and fine face of Samson? or the muscular Philistine gazing furtively at the lovely Delilah? or is it the rich drapery? or is it the truth to nature in that pretty foot? No, sir. The first thing that catches the eye is the scissors at her feet. Them scissors is too modern; thar warn't no scissors like them in them days--by a d---d sight.” That was a brilliant and audacious conception, having the just proportion of sanguinary humour, embodied in Mark Twain's offer, during his lecture on the Sandwich Islands, to show his audience how the cannibals consume their food--if only some lady would lend him a live baby. There is the same wildly humorous tactlessness in the delicious anecdote of Higgins.