We may be sure that all life from the very beginning has had its humorous no less than its serious side. If any record had been kept, we should no doubt find that Adam and Eve had their jokes about the apples--it is universally assumed that they _were_ apples--on that forbidden tree, and that they were quite as good as any jokes that have been made about those same apples in more recent years. The masons and bricklayers on the tower of Babel no doubt poked their thumbs into each other's ribs and slapped each other on the back to emphasize their rude jokes about the late "wet spell," and wondered how long it would take to get to Heaven with their building. And we imagine that even during the flood itself there were sanguine souls who took the whole matter philosophically, declaring that 'it never rained long when the clouds looked _that_ way and the wind was in _that_ direction.' The Israelites, we suspect, lightened their bondage in Egypt by mimicking the pompous manners of their hated taskmasters and ridiculing the fools who thought that bricks could be made without straw. And the grimmest Egyptian mummy that now graces a museum or helps to fertilize the wheat-fields of the West once wore a smile or grin upon his leathern face as he related to a brother mummy how Pharoah made sport of the Israelites by promising to "let them go," and then when they were all on tip-toe with expectation, countermanding the order. Then they would both shake their heads and chuckle with delight over the pleasant humor of their monarch and declare that 'Pharoah was in high spirits to-day.' Thus the world has rolled and chirruped and cackled on since the time when man emerged from the animal. And Holmes suggests, in our motto, that the sense of humor was in the animal before man. I. Sometimes the humor of the Bible lies in the thing described,--the odd or awkward or absurd thing said or done. "The Iliad," says Sidney Smith, "would never have come down to these times, if Agamemnon had given Achilles a box on the ear. We should have trembled for the AEneid, if some Trojan nobleman had kicked the pious AEneas in the fourth book. AEneas, may have deserved it, but he never could have founded the Roman Empire after so distressing an accident." And yet accidents quite as distressing, if not of precisely the same nature, have happened in the best families that ever lived upon this planet. The writers of the Bible have not hesitated to give us a very frank account of some of them.