vel-books are his least excellent;
he is happiest at home, in the country of his own Blue Jay.

The contrasts, the energy, the mixture of races in America, the
overflowing young life of the continent, doubtless give its humorists the
richness of its vein. All over the land men are eternally "swopping
stories" at bars, and in the long, endless journeys by railway and
steamer. How little, comparatively, the English "swop stories"! The
Scotch are almost as much addicted as the Americans to this form of
barter, so are the Irish. The Englishman has usually a dignified dread
of dropping into his "anecdotage."

The stories thus collected in America are the subsoil of American
literary humour, a rich soil in which the plant cultivated by Mark Twain
and Mr. Frank Stockton grows with vigour and puts forth fruit and
flowers. Mr. Stockton is very unlike Mark Twain: he is quiet,
domesticated, the jester of the family circle. Yet he has shown in
"Rudder Grange," and in "The Transferred Ghost," very great powers, and a
pleasant, dry kind of Amontillado flavour in his fun, which somewhat
reminds one of Thackeray--the Thackeray of the "Bedford-row Conspiracy"
and of "A Little Dinner at Timmins." Mr. Stockton's vein is a little too
connubial--a little too rich in the humours and experiences of young
married people. But his fun is rarely strained or artificial, except in
the later chapters of "Rudder Grange," and he has a certain kindliness
and tenderness not to be always met with in the jester. His angling and
hunting pieces are excellent, and so are those of Mr. Charles Dudley
Warner. This humorist (like Alceste) was once "funnier than he had
supposed," when he sat down with a certain classical author, to study the
topography of Epipolae. But his talent is his own, and very agreeable,
though he once so forgot himself as to jest on the Deceased Wife's
Sister. When we think of those writers to whom we all owe so much, it
would be sheer ingratitude to omit the name of the master of them all,
Oliver Wendell Holmes. Here is a wit who is a scholar, and almost a
poet, and whose humour is none the less precious for being accompanied by
good humour, learning, a wide experience of the world. With Mr. Lowell,
he belongs to an older generation, yet reigns among the present. May the
reign be long!

SHOW SUNDAY.

The years bring round very quickly the old familiar events. Yesterday
was Show Sunday. It scarcely seems a year