gure--on laying
all the cobbles of a conversation, he should at least allow another to
carry the tarpot and fill in the chinks. When the evening was over,
although I recalled two or three clever stories, which I shall botch
in the telling, I came away tired and dissatisfied, my tongue dry with
disuse.

Now I would not seek that kind of man as a companion with whom to be
becalmed in a sailboat, and I would not wish to go to the country with
him, least of all to the North Woods or any place outside of
civilization. I am sure that he would sulk if he were deprived of an
audience. He would be crotchety at breakfast across his bacon.
Certainly for the woods a humorous man is better company, for his
humor in mischance comforts both him and you. A humorous man--and here
lies the heart of the matter--a humorous man has the high gift of
regarding an annoyance in the very stroke of it as another man shall
regard it when the annoyance is long past. If a humorous person falls
out of a canoe he knows the exquisite jest while his head is still
bobbing in the cold water. A witty man, on the contrary, is sour until
he is changed and dry: but in a week's time when company is about, he
will make a comic story of it.

My friend A---- with whom I went once into the Canadian woods has
genuine humor, and no one can be a more satisfactory comrade. I do not
recall that he said many comic things, and at bottom he was serious as
the best humorists are. But in him there was a kind of joy and
exaltation that lasted throughout the day. If the duffle were piled
too high and fell about his ears, if the dinner was burned or the tent
blew down in a driving storm at night, he met these mishaps as though
they were the very things he had come north to get, as though without
them the trip would have lacked its spice. This is an easy philosophy
in retrospect but hard when the wet canvas falls across you and the
rain beats in. A---- laughed at the very moment of disaster as another
man will laugh later in an easy chair. I see him now swinging his axe
for firewood to dry ourselves when we were spilled in a rapids; and
again, while pitching our tent on a sandy beach when another storm had
drowned us. And there is a certain cry of his (dully, _Wow!_ on paper)
expressive to the initiated of all things gay, which could never issue
from the mouth of a merely witty man.

Real humor is primarily human--or divine, to be exact--and after that
the fun may follow na