THE HABIT OF THE HUMORIST.

My friend Smithers is a humorist by profession that is to say, he makes a good living out of professed humor. He is a solemn sort of person in his general demeanor. It has been said of him, by those who know him only by sight, that he has a secret sorrow concealed somewhere about his person; that the canker of care is apparently at work gnawing away at his vitals—which accounts, they say, for the air of depression he carries about with him when he goes before the public. I, who know him well, have noticed that this depressed atmospheric quality is not affected. It is habitual with him, but it must not be attributed to any canker, cark, or care. He is not depressed. He has no canker. Cark he knows not, and care is a word utterly unknown to the bright lexicon of his youth. His is a case of sunshine confined. His life is a bit of melody printed in the guise of a funeral march. He perpetually reminds me of a babbling brook running through a dark untraversable forest. His melancholic is not an internal disorder-it is simply an external evidence of something which does not exist. To use his own expression, "He is built that way."

"Why don't you brace up," I said to him a few days ago," and assume an external gayety if you have it not?"

"Do you

"Why should I?" he replied. want me to ruin my prospects in life, to pass over entirely the question of preserving my individuality?"

"But your appearance is a bit of deceit. You are not an undertaker, but you look like one. You look like a funeral director whose last friend has died, and given the contract for burying him to a rival."

."What would you have me look like- -a ballet dancer, an acrobat, or a snow-shoveller?" "No, I wouldn't at all. Make yourself look

like a humorist."

"How?" he asked. "In what respect can I change my appearance so as to let the world know that I live by jokes alone? Shall I write jests on my shirt bosoms, and wear them as an accessory to a dress suit? Shall I wear trousers that excite the derision of the public? Shall I wear an absurd hat, ridiculous shoes, laughable waistcoats, and gauzy, comical conceits in the way of neck-gear? How should a humorist appear on the outside, I would like to know?"

"You are talking foolishly. Of course I would not have you appear undignified, but you should cultivate an air of gayety, you should give the impression that your life is a laugh--you needn't make an epitaph of your self six days of the week, and come out as an obituary on the seventh."

"Hold on a minute," he observed. "I'll take that down. It's good enough to print." Then he noted my remark in the little blank book which is his inseparable companion.

"As I understand you," he continued, clos

ing the book languidly, and putting it back in his pocket, "you want me to go before the public disguised as a grin. Shall I show my teeth? Is it necessary for me to be a broad grin or just an ordinary smile, or is it as a convulsion of mirth you think I should show myself to οἵ πολλοί

"You wilfully misunderstand me," I said. "In the first place your countenance is the picture of asperity. Your eye is cold, and when it fastens upon a proper subject it glitters. You dress usually in black, your clothes are sombre, and I never saw you smile in public but once in my life, and that was when somebody threatened to shoot you for using his name in a comic poem. You do not do yourself justice, my dear fellow."

"Ah! I begin to comprehend you. You want me to warm my eye over, and envelop it with a film when I fasten it upon a fellowoccupant of a horse-car, for instance. Then you wish me to wear that mild, conciliating expression that is so characteristic of the satirist, and to do myself absolute justice you would have me overcome with terror when I am threatened by a weak-minded maniac who carries a Colt's revolver charged with lead, and in addition to all this I must dress like a rainbow. Well, I refuse. I shall under no circumstances wear the sign of my profession on my sleeve. If I appeared as you wish me to, my jests would seem mournful by contrast, and for this very reason I intend to maintain that air of melancholy reserve that you claim is characteristic of me. As I now stand, people say, 'How strange it is that one so solemn and sad as he can be so exquisitely humorous! It will be an unhappy day for my larder, my family, and my inner man when people observe, 'How singular that the jokes of a living laugh, of a walking jest, of a palpitant bon mot, are so abominably melancholy! That is my platform, and now that you have it, don't talk to me again about making a sandwich man of myself to advertise my business. So say no more. It is my treat. What will you have a hair-cut or a quinine pill?"

And under the genial influence of the latter, I came to see that, after all, my witty though funereal-appearing friend might perhaps be in the right.

A FORTUNATE ESCAPE.

It was a dainty fair-haired maid of Milwaukee, of some five or six summers, who sat beside a little friend relating the advent of a new baby in the family.

"She was borned while your mamma was 'way down South, wasn't she?" asked the friend.

"Yes," replied the proud older sister.

"Well, I tell you, you were very fortunate to have her born white down there, because most of the little babies that are born in the South are born black," was the congratulatory response of the wide-eyed friend.

WE are quite in the electric way. We boast that we have made electricity our slave, but the slave whom we do not understand is our master. And before we know him we shall be transformed. Mr. Edison proposes to send us over the country at the rate of one hundred miles an hour. This pleases us, because we fancy we shall save time, and because we are taught that the chief object in life is to "get there" quickly. We really have an idea that it is a gain to annihilate distance, forgetting that as a matter of personal experience we are already too near most people. But this speed by rail will enable us to live in Philadelphia and do business in New York. It will make the city of Chicago two hundred miles square. And the bigger Chicago is, the more important this world becomes. This pleasing anticipation-that of travelling by lightning, and all being huddled together-is

nothing to the promised universal illumination by a diffused light that shall make midnight as bright as noonday. We shall then save all the time there is, and at the age of thirty-five have lived the allotted seventy years, and long, if not for Götterdämmerung, at least for some world where, by touching a button, we can discharge our limbs of electricity and take a little repose. The most restless and ambitious of us can hardly conceive of Chicago as a desirable future state of exist

ence.

This, however, is only the external or superficial view of the subject; at the best it is only symbolical. Mr. Edison is wasting his time in objective experiments, while we are in the deepest ignorance as to our electric personality or our personal electricity. We begin to apprehend that we are electric beings, that these outward manifestations of a subtle form

are only hints of our internal state. Mr. Edison should turn his attention from physics to humanity electrically considered in its social condition. We have heard a great deal about affinities. We are told that one person is positive and another negative, and that representing socially opposite poles they should come together and make an electric harmony, that two positives or two negatives repel each other, and if conventionally united end in divorce, and so on. We read that such a man is magnetic, meaning that he can poll a great many votes; or that such a woman thrilled her audience, meaning probably that they were in an electric condition to be shocked by her. Now this is what we want to find out-to know if persons are really magnetic or sympathetic, and how to tell whether a person is positive or negative. In politics we are quite at sea. What is the good of sending a man to Washington at the rate of a hundred miles an hour if we are uncertain of his electric state? The ideal House of Representatives ought to be pretty nearly balanced-half positive, half negative. Some Congresses seem to be made up pretty much of negatives. The time for the electrician to test the candidate is before he is put in nomination, not dump him into Congress as we do now, utterly ignorant of whether his currents run from his heels to his head or from his head to his heels, uncertain, indeed, as to whether he has magnetism to run in at all. Nothing could be more unscientific than the process and the result.

In social life it is infinitely worse. You, an electric unmarried man, enter a room full of attractive women. How are you to know who is positive and who is negative, or who is a maiden lady in equilibrium, if it be true, as scientists affirm, that the genus old maid is one in whom the positive currents neutralize the negative currents? Your affinity is perhaps the plainest woman in the room. But beauty is a juggling sprite, entirely uncontrolled by electricity, and you are quite likely to make a mistake. It is absurd the way we blunder on in a scientific age. We touch a button, and are married. The judge touches another button, and we are divorced. If when we touched the first button it revealed us both negatives, we should start back in horror, for it is only before engagement that two negatives make an affirmative. That is the reason that some clergymen refuse to marry a divorced woman; they see that she has made one electric mistake, and fear she will make another. It is all very well for the officiating clergyman to ask the two intending to commit matrimony if they have a license from the town clerk, if they are of age or have the consent of parents, and have a million; but the vital point is omitted. Are they electric af finities? It should be the duty of the town clerk, by a battery, or by some means to be discovered by electricians, to find out the galvanic habit of the parties, their prevailing electric condition. Temporarily they may

seem to be in harmony, and may deceive themselves into the belief that they are at opposite poles equidistant from the equator, and certain to meet on that imaginary line in matrimonial bliss. Dreadful will be the awakening to an insipid life, if they find they both have the same sort of currents. It is said that women change their minds and their dispositions, that men are fickle, and that both give way after marriage to natural inclinations that were suppressed while they were on the good behavior that the supposed necessity of getting married imposes. This is so notoriously true that it ought to create a public panic. But there is hope in the new light. If we understand it, persons are born in a certain electrical condition, and substantially continue in it, however much they may apparently wobble about under the influence of infirm minds and acquired wickedness. There are, of course, variations of the compass to be reckoned with, and the magnet may occasionally be bewitched by near and powerful attracting objects. But, on the whole, the magnet remains the same, and it is probable that a person's normal electric condition is the thing in him least liable to dangerous variation. If this be true, the best basis for matrimony is the electric, and our social life would have fewer disappointments if men and women went about labelled with their scientifically ascertained electric qualities. CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.

ON AN ORATOR.
NAMELESS YET FAMOUS.

He has no ideas-but success
Is his extraordinary.

I think he owes it, more or less,
To his vocabulary,

Which knows no mot

That does not go

Through fourteen syllables or so; And people think if he knows his intent, A genius he must be from heaven sent.

LOOKED SAFER.

THE following incident occurred some years ago, when stage-travelling in the White Mountain region was more common than now.

One very dark and cloudy night, one of the well-known Jehus was driving his stage, both lamps brilliantly lighted, and hearing the galloping of an approaching horseman he pulled up his team to let him pass. In another minute there was a tremendous collision with his

leaders, and quickly getting down from his box, he found the rider, an Irishman, had ridden squarely in between the leaders, and all three horses were floundering in the mud. After a good deal of work the animals were at last disentangled, and then the following dialogue took place:

DRIVER. How in thunder came you in there? Didn't you see my lights?”

PAT. "Faith I did; an' I thought I'd go atween 'em."