ld me the story, began to laugh over it, and from that
moment "ceased to groan." He was not discharged, and in less than
a month people everywhere were laughing and joking about the
"murder at Dutch Nick's."

Out of that full, free Western life, with its tremendous hazards of
fortune, its extravagant alternations from fabulous wealth to wretched
poverty, its tremendous exaggerations and incredible contrasts, was
evolved a humour as rugged, as mountainous, and as altitudinous as the
conditions which gave it birth. Mark Twain may be said to have created,
and made himself master of, this new and fantastic humour which, in its
exaggeration and elaboration, was without a parallel in the history of
humorous narration. At times it seemed little more than a sort of
infectious and hilarious nonsense; but in reality it had behind it all
the calculation of detail and elaboration. There was something in it
of the volcanic, as if at the bursting forth of some pentup force of
primitive nature. It consisted in piling Pelion on Ossa, until the
structure toppled over of its own weight and fell with a stentorian
crash of laughter which echoed among the stars. Whenever Mark Twain
conceived a humorous idea, he seemed capable of extracting from it
infinite complications of successive and cumulative comedy. This humour
seemed like the mental functionings of some mad, yet inevitably logical
jester; it grew from more to more, from extravagance to extravagance,
until reason itself tired and gave over. Such explosive stories as 'How
I Edited an Agricultural Paper', 'A Genuine Mexican Plug', the
deciphering of the Horace Greeley correspondence, 'The Facts in the Case
of the Great Beef Contract, and many another, as Mr. Chesterton has
pointed out, have one tremendous essential of great art. "The
excitement mounts up perpetually; they grow more and more comic, as a
tragedy should grow more and more tragic. The rack, tragic or comic,
goes round until something breaks inside a man. In tragedy it is his
heart, or perhaps his stiff neck. In farce I do not quite know what it
is--perhaps his funny-bone is dislocated; perhaps his skull is slightly
cracked." Mark Twain's mountainous humour, of this early type, never
contains the element of final surprise, of the sudden, the unexpected,
the _imprevu_. We know what is coming, we surrender ourselves more and
more to the mood of the narrator, holding ourselves in reserve until
laug