d I said, 'Why is this thus? What is the reason of this thusness?'
They hove a sigh--seventeen sighs of different size. They said:

"'O, soon thou will be gonested away.'

"I told them that when I got ready to leave a place I wentested.

"They said, 'Doth not like us?'

"I said, 'I doth--I doth.'

"I also said, 'I hope your intentions are honorable, as I am a lone
child--my parents being far--far away.'

"They then said, 'Wilt not marry us?'

"I said, 'O no, it cannot was.'

"When they cried, 'O cruel man! this is too much!--O! too much,' I told
them that it was on account of the muchness that I declined."

It is hard to define the difference between the humor of one writer and
another, or of one nation and another. It can be felt and can be
illustrated by quoting examples, but scarcely described in general
terms. It has been said of that class of American humorists of which
Artemus Ward is a representative that their peculiarity consists in
extravagance, surprise, audacity, and irreverence. But all these
qualities have characterized other schools of humor. There is the same
element of surprise in De Quincey's anti-climax, "Many a man has dated
his ruin from some murder or other which, perhaps, at the time he
thought little of," as in Artemus's truism that "a comic paper ought to
publish a joke now and then." The violation of logic which makes us
laugh at an Irish bull is likewise the source of the humor in Artemus's
saying of Jeff Davis, that "it would have been better than ten dollars
in his pocket if he had never been born;" or in his advice, "Always
live within your income, even if you have to borrow money to do so;"
or, again, in his announcement that "Mr. Ward will pay no debts of his
own contracting." A kind of ludicrous confusion, caused by an unusual
collocation of words, is also one of his favorite tricks, as when he
says of Brigham Young, "He's the most married man I ever saw in my
life;" or when, having been drafted at several hundred different places
where he had been exhibiting his wax figures, he says that if he went
on he should soon become a regiment, and adds, "I never knew that there
was so many of me." With this a whimsical understatement and an
affectation of simplicity, as where he expresses his willingness to
sacrifice "even his wife's relations" on the altar of patriotism; or
where, in delightful unconsciousness of his own sins against
orthography, he pronounces that "Chaucer w