Personally, I no sooner see the man with the big face than instinctively I turn my eyes away. I look round the hall for another man that I know is always there, the opposite type, the little man with the spectacles. There he sits, good soul, about twelve rows back, his large spectacles beaming with appreciation and his quick face anticipating every point. I imagine him to be by trade a minor journalist or himself a writer of sorts, but with not enough of success to have spoiled him. There are other people always there, too. There is the old lady who thinks the lecture improper; it doesn't matter how moral it is, she's out for impropriety and she can find it anywhere. Then there is another very terrible man against whom all American lecturers in England should be warned--the man who is leaving on the 9 P.M. train. English railways running into suburbs and near-by towns have a schedule which is expressly arranged to have the principal train leave before the lecture ends. Hence the 9-P.M.-train man. He sits right near the front, and at ten minutes to nine he gathers up his hat, coat, and umbrella very deliberately, rises with great calm, and walks firmly away. His air is that of a man who has stood all that he can and can bear no more. Till one knows about this man, and the others who rise after him, it is very disconcerting; at first I thought I must have said something to reflect upon the royal family. But presently the lecturer gets to understand that it is only the nine-o'clock train and that all the audience know about it. Then it's all right. It's just like the people rising and stretching themselves after the seventh innings in baseball. In all that goes above I have been emphasising the fact that the British and the American sense of humour are essentially the same thing. But there are, of course, peculiar differences of form and peculiar preferences of material that often make them seem to diverge widely. By this I mean that each community has, within limits, its own particular ways of being funny and its own particular conception of a joke. Thus, a Scotchman likes best a joke which he has all to himself or which he shares reluctantly with a few; the thing is too rich to distribute. The American loves particularly as his line of joke an anecdote with the point all concentrated at the end and exploding in a phrase. The Englishman loves best as his joke the narration of something that actually did happen and that depends, of course; for its point on its reality. There are plenty of minor differences, too, in point of mere form, and very naturally each community finds the particular form used by the others less pleasing than its own. In fact, for this very reason each people is apt to think its own humour the best.