ABSTRACT
Some years since, I amused myself during a railway journey between Providence and New York by watching a man in front of me read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer steadily for an hour without once cracking a smile or giving a chuckle. Even a slow reader must in that time have got to the inimitable scene in which Tom gets his chums to whitewash the fence and pay him for the privilege of being allowed to do it, so I felt warranted in concluding that the saturnine stranger in front· of me was a prodigy who had never known the pleasure of a hearty laugh and never been a boy. Perhaps, however, he had pre-
viously read Professor Charles F. Richardson's pathetic advice to Mark Twain and our other humorists to 'make hay while the sun shines,' and had concluded, as a good American Philistine, that, the vogue of these humorists being but temporary, it would be highly improper for a devotee of eternity to concern himself with their works save for the laudable purpose of drawing from them salutary lessons with regard to idleness and want of sobriety and decorous dulness. He had evidently never read Professor Brander Matthews's appreciative essay on 'Mark Twain's Best Story,' or he would have learned that our greatest humorist had already laid up perennial if not eternal treasure in the very book he was then reading so sedately and in its admirable sequel.
