I had the pleasure of being well acquainted with Mr. Charles H. Webb, a truly funny “funny man,” who had homes in New York and Nantucket.  His slight stutter only added to the effect of his humorous talk.  His letters to the New York Tribune from Long Branch, Saratoga, etc., were widely read.  He knew that he wrote absolute nonsense at times, but nonsense is greatly needed in this world, and exquisitely droll nonsensical nonsense is as uncommon as common sense.  The titles of his various books are inviting and informing, as Seaweed and What We Seed.  He wrote several parodies on sensational novels of his time. Griffith Gaunt, he made fun of as “Liffith Lank”; St. Elmo, as “St. Twelmo.” A Wicked Woman was another absurd tale.  But I like best a large volume, “John Paul’s Book, moral and instructive, travels, tales, poetry, and like fabrications, with several portraits of the author and other spirited engravings.”  This book was dedicated, “To the Bald-Headed, that noble and shining army of martyrs.”  When you turn to look at his portrait, and the illuminated title page, you find them not.  The Frontispiece picture is upside down.  The very ridiculosity of his easy daring to do or say anything is taking.  He once wrote, in one of those trying books, with which we used to be bored stiff, with questions such as “What is your favourite hour of the day?  He wrote dinner hour; what book not sacred would you part with last?  My pocket-book.  Your favourite motto?  When you must,—­you better.”  I especially liked the poem, “The Outside Dog in the Fight.”  Here are two specimens of his prose: 

The fish-hawk is not an eagle.  Mountain heights and clouds he never scales; fish are more in his way, he scales them—­possibly regarding them as scaly-wags.  For my bird is pious; a stern conservator is he of the public morals.  Last Sunday a frivolous fish was playing not far from the beach, and Dr. Hawk went out and stopped him.  ’Tis fun to watch him at that sort of work—­stopping play—­though somehow it does not seem to amuse the fish much.  Up in the air he poises pensively, hanging on hushed wings as though listening for sounds—­maybe a fish’s.  By and by he hears a herring—­is he hard of herring, think you?  Then down he drops and soon has a Herring Safe. (Send me something, manufacturers, immediately.) Does he tear his prey from limb to limb?  No, he merely sails away through the blue ether—­how happy can he be with either!—­till the limb whereon his own nest is built is reached.  Does the herring enjoy that sort of riding, think you?  Quite as much, I should say, as one does hack-driving.  From my point of view, the hawk is but the hackman of the air.  Sympathize with the fish?  Not much.  Nor would you if you heard the pitiful cry the hawk sets up the moment he finds that his claws are tangled in a fish’s back.  Home he flies to seek domestic consolation, uttering the while the weeping cry of a grieved child;