He was always fond, poor fellow, of joking on the subject of his personal appearance. His spare figure and tall stature, his prominent nose and his light-colored hair, were each made the subject of a joke at one time or another in the course of his lecturing career. If he laughed largely at the foibles of others, he was equally disposed to laugh at any shortcomings he could detect in himself. If anything at all in his outward form was to him a source of vanity, it was the delicate formation of his hands. White, soft, long, slender, and really handsome, they were more like the hands of a high-born lady than those of a Western editor. He attended to them with careful pride, and never alluded to them as a subject for his jokes, until, in his last illness, they had become unnaturally fair, translucent, and attenuated. Then it was that a friend calling upon him at his apartments in Piccadilly, endeavoured to cheer him at a time of great mental depression, and pleasantly reminded him of a ride they had long ago projected through the South-Western States of the Union. "We must do that ride yet, Artemus. Short stages at first, and longer ones as we go on." Poor Artemus lifted up his pale, slender hands, and letting the light shine through them, said jocosely, "Do you think these would do to hold a rein with? Why, the horse would laugh at them." Having collected a sufficient number of quaint thoughts, whimsical fancies, bizarre notions, and ludicrous anecdotes, the difficulty which then, according to his own confession, occurred to Artemus Ward was, what should be the title of his lecture. The subject was no difficulty at all, for the simple reason that there was not to be any. The idea of instructing or informing his audience never once entered into his plans. His intention was merely to amuse; if possible, keep the house in continuous laughter for an hour and a half, or rather an hour and twenty minutes, for that was the precise time, in his belief, which people could sit to listen and to laugh without becoming bored; and, if possible, send his audience home well pleased with the lecturer and with themselves, without their having any clear idea of that which they had been listening to, and not one jot the wiser than when they came. No one better understood than Artemus the wants of a miscellaneous audience who paid their dollar or half-dollar each to be amused. No one could gauge better than he the capacity of the crowd to feed on pure fun, and no one could discriminate more clearly than he the fitness, temper, and mental appetite of the constituents of his evening assemblies. The prosiness of an ordinary Mechanics' Institute lecture was to him simply abhorrent; the learned platitudes of a professed lecturer were to him, to use one of his own phrases, "worse than poison." To make people laugh was to be his primary endeavour. If in so making them laugh he could also cause them to see through a sham, be