mercury, found a lump of quicksilver in each boot, when he went home to dinner.  This power of rapidly dramatizing a dry fact into flesh and blood and the vivid conception of Joe as a human thermometer strike me as showing a poetic sense that may be refined into faculty.  At any rate there is humor here, and not mere quickness of wit,—­the deeper and not the shallower quality.  The tendency of humor is always towards overplus of expression, while the very essence of wit is its logical precision.  Captain Basil Hall denied that our people had any humor, deceived, perhaps, by their gravity of manner.  But this very seriousness is often the outward sign of that humorous quality of the mind which delights in finding an element of identity in things seemingly the most incongruous, and then again in forcing an incongruity upon things identical.  Perhaps Captain Hall had no humor himself, and if so he would never find it.  Did he always feel the point of what was said to himself?  I doubt it, because I happen to know a chance he once had given him in vain.  The Captain was walking up and down the veranda of a country tavern in Massachusetts while the coach changed horses.  A thunder-storm was going on, and, with that pleasant European air of indirect self-compliment in condescending to be surprised by American merit, which we find so conciliating, he said to a countryman lounging against the door, ’Pretty heavy thunder you have here.’  The other, who had divined at a glance his feeling of generous concession to a new country, drawled gravely, ’Waal, we du, considerin’ the number of inhabitants.’  This, the more I analyze it, the more humorous does it seem.  The same man was capable of wit also, when he would.  He was a cabinet-maker, and was once employed to make some commandment-tables for the parish meeting-house.  The parson, a very old man, annoyed him by looking into his workshop every morning, and cautioning him to be very sure to pick out ’clear mahogany without any knots in it.’  At last, wearied out, he retorted one day:  ‘Wal, Dr. B., I guess ef I was to leave the nots out o’ some o’ the c’man’ments, ‘t’ould soot you full ez wal!’

If I had taken the pains to write down the proverbial or pithy phrases I have heard, or if I had sooner thought of noting the Yankeeisms I met with in my reading, I might have been able to do more justice to my theme.  But I have done all I wished in respect to pronunciation, if I have proved that where we are vulgar, we have the countenance of very good company.  For, as to the jus et norma loquendi, I agree with Horace and those who have paraphrased or commented him, from Boileau to Gray.  I think that a good rule for style is Galiani’s definition of sublime oratory,—­’l’art de tout dire sans etre mis a la Bastille dans un pays ou il est defendu de rien dire.’  I profess myself a fanatical purist, but with a hearty contempt for the speech-gilders who affect purism without any