The result of my friend’s lecture was that within a week we were sliding downhill and enjoying ourselves in the old way, and in less than a fortnight the prophets of culture had departed in search of fresh pastures. I do hope, however, that Mrs. Measel will succeed, for she deserves to if ever a woman did. She has educated two children on the profits--or rather the spoils --of the Browning craze, and has made Tolstoï pay for the care of an invalid sister. She gives more culture for the money than any one in the business, and I can heartily commend her to any club or community that feels a yearning for the Unknowable. SOME THOUGHTS ON THE CONSTRUCTION AND PRESERVATION OF JOKES. I.--THE “JOKAL CALENDAR.” Every joke has its appropriate season. The true humorist--one who finds comedy in everything--gathers his ideas from what goes on about him, and by a subtle alchemy of his own distils from them jokes suitable to the changing seasons. The only laws to which childhood willingly yields obedience are those unwritten statutes which compel the proper observance of “trap-time,” “kite-time,” and “marble-time.” So even must the humorist recognize the different periods allotted respectively to goats, stovepipes, ice-cream, and other foundations of merriment. The _Jokal Calendar_ begins in the early summer, when girls are leading young men into ice-cream saloons, and keepers of summer resorts are preparing new swindles for their guests. Soon the farmer will gather in his crop of summer boarders; the city fisherman will entangle his patent flies in the branches of lofty trees, while the country lad catches all the trout with a worm. Then the irate father and the bulldog will drive the lover from the front gate, while married men who remain in the city during their wives’ absence play poker until early morn and take grass-widows to Coney Island. About this time the chronicler of humor goes into the country, whence he will return in the early fall with a fresh stock of ideas, gathered in the village store, at the farm-house table, and by the shores of the sounding sea.