light that they would float
wherever the ground was a little damp. Typically American in its
grotesquerie was the assertion of a rural humorist who asserted that the
hogs thereabout were so thin they had to have a knot tied in their
tails to prevent them from crawling through the chinks in the fence.

Ward displayed the like quality amusingly in his remark to the conductor
of a tediously slow-moving accommodation train in the South. From his
seat in the solitary passenger coach behind the long line of freight
cars, he addressed the official with great seriousness:

"I ask you, conductor, why don't you take the cow-catcher off the engine
and put it behind the car here? As it is now, there ain't a thing to
hinder a cow from strolling into a car and biting a passenger."

Similar extravagance appears in another story of a crawling train. The
conductor demanded a ticket from a baldheaded old man whose face was
mostly hidden in a great mass of white whiskers.

"I give it to ye," declared the ancient.

"I don't reckon so," the conductor answered. "Where did you get on?"

"At Perkins' Crossin'," he of the hoary beard replied.

The conductor shook his head emphatically.

"Wasn't anybody got aboard at Perkins' Crossin' 'cept one little boy."

"I," wheezed the aged man, "was that little boy."

In like fashion, we tell of a man so tall that he had to go up on a
ladder to shave himself--and down cellar to put his boots on.

We Americans are good-natured, as is necessary for humor, and we have
brains, as is necessary for wit, and we have the vitality that makes
creation easy, even inevitable. So there is never any dearth among us of
the spirit of laughter, of its multiform products that by their power
to amuse make life vastly more agreeable. Every newspaper, and most
magazines carry their quota of jests. Never, anywhere, was the good
story so universally popular as in America today. It is received with
gusto in the councils of government, in church, in club, in cross-roads
store. The teller of good stories is esteemed by all, a blessing
undisguised. The collection that follows in this volume is, it is
believed, of a sort that will help mightily to build an honorable fame
for the narrator.

For greater convenience in references to the volume, the various stories
and anecdotes are placed under headings arranged in alphabetical order.
The heading in every case indicates the subject to which the narration
may be directly ap