“Thor smash thee!” cried the Hvaecere; and tossing away his shield, he lifted aloft, in both hands, his mighty axe. It trembled in the air, ready to descend. Too late,—for the brick of Maginnis landed square between the hero’s eyes,—and you and I had to be descended from the younger brother. 25. The Whackers, therefore, are not ancestors that one needs blush to own.[1] But I have not meant to boast. Else had I been unworthy of them. They were Anglo-Saxon; and when I have said that, I have said that they had a certain sturdy love of truth, for which this race is conspicuous. And so this book may be absurd, or even wicked, nay, worst of all, dull; but one thing you may rely upon. Every word in it will be true. ----- [1] I sometimes wonder how some people can plume themselves on their descent, though able to trace it back only to the Norman Conquest. J. B. W. 26. II.—THE DANICHESTERS. It did not seem so while I was writing it, but now that my book is finished, it strikes me as one of the oddest works I have ever read. You can never tell what is coming next. Even to me it was a series of surprises. Read the first ten lines of any chapter. Now read the last ten. Heavens, how did he get there! I seem never to know whither, or how far I am going. It has been the same with me all my life. Often, as a boy, I have set out for a neighbor’s on a mule, and not gone all the way. Another singular trait about this book is what I must be allowed to call its unconscious humor. A strange thing to say about one’s own book; but somehow, when I am reading it, I can’t shake off the impression that some other fellow wrote it, or that I wrote it in my sleep,—so many things do I find in it which I could almost swear I never thought of in my life. And there are a dozen passages in it where I slapped my thigh, crying out, Good! Good! And more than once I caught myself saying, By Jove, I should like to know the old boy who wrote this! Yet, never in my life was I more serious than when I sat down to write this work; for it was the solemn, theological, Huguenot molecules of my brain that set me to writing; and the book was to be too grave to bring a ripple to the beak of a Laughing Jackass,—that jovial kingfisher whose professional hilarity cheers the lone Australian shepherd. Now, since man—as every college-boy knows—and it is well to know something—since man is but the sum of his ancestors modified by his environment, whence have I derived this trait of mine, this unconscious humor,—the gift, that is, of making people laugh without intending it? Many persons have it, but where did _I_ get it?