To write a humorous story you will need to employ epigram, point, climax, colloquialisms, and perhaps dialect. If you touch dialect, however, take care to know what you are about; for nothing is more repellent to a reader familiar with a particular vernacular than to be confronted with pitiful and incorrect attempts at it. To write negro dialect you should be as well versed as Joel Chandler Harris; to write Irish, as apt as Samuel Lover or W. B. Yeats; to reveal children, as sympathetic as Kate Douglas Wiggin; to give us boy's fun, as charming and wholesome as Thomas Bailey Aldrich; to combine humor and the ingenious tale, you should be as inventive as Frank R. Stockton; and to smile at Americans and their foibles you should be as patriotic and kindly as Charles Battell Loomis. George Washington Cable, Ian Maclaren, Thomas Nelson Page, J. M. Barrie, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman have written excellent dialect, but they are not primarily humorists. They use the vernacular of the people as aids to character revelation. The difference between a humorous story and comic anecdote is the difference of length and veracity. An anecdote purports to be true. A humorous story, only "drawn from life." =The Expatriation of Jonathan Taintor= Reprinted by permission from Loomis's "Cheerful Americans." Copyright, Henry Holt and Company. While I was in London I met a New York friend who was stopping in that America-in-London, Bloomsbury, and during our conversation he told me that he had for a fellow-boarder no less a person than Jonathan Taintor. I felt that I ought to know Jonathan Taintor, and I have since found out that most people have heard something concerning him; but although the name had a good old Connecticut sound, I could not fit Mr. Taintor into any nook, so I frankly said to my friend: "Jonathan Taintor lies in the future for me." "Why, I'll have to introduce you. I believe he's been written up before, but he's such a character that it will do you good to meet him. Can't you come to dinner tonight?" Now, I had been reckoning on going that evening to the opera at Covent Garden; but characters do not pop around every corner, and, besides, I had not seen my New York friend for a long time, so I accepted his cordial invitation. That evening at seven I went to the American boarding-house in Bedford Place, just off High Holborn, and was soon sitting at dinner with my friend. Directly opposite me sat a man who might have left the valley of the Connecticut five minutes before. There are Taintors all about the Haddams that look just like him. He was short, thick-set, with dreamy blue eyes, a ruddy face that betokened a correct life, a curved nose, broad, straight, shaven upper lip, and a straggling silver chin-beard. There was more or less twang in the tones of every one at the table, but his voice had a special nasal quality that seemed to bespeak a lifetime of bucolic Yankee existence. It was really so pronounced as to sound stagy.