But it is hard to move a new English acquaintance when he is by himself, or when the company present is small and new to him.  He is on his guard then, and his natural reserve is to the fore.  This has given him the false reputation of being without humor and without the appreciation of humor.

Americans are not Englishmen, and American humor is not English humor; but both the American and his humor had their origin in England, and have merely undergone changes brought about by changed conditions and a new environment.  About the best humorous speeches I have yet heard were a couple that were made in Australia at club suppers—­one of them by an Englishman, the other by an Australian.

CHAPTER XII.

There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow:  Yet it was the schoolboy who said “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” 
                                  —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

In Sydney I had a large dream, and in the course of talk I told it to a missionary from India who was on his way to visit some relatives in New Zealand.  I dreamed that the visible universe is the physical person of God; that the vast worlds that we see twinkling millions of miles apart in the fields of space are the blood corpuscles in His veins; and that we and the other creatures are the microbes that charge with multitudinous life the corpuscles.

Mr. X., the missionary, considered the dream awhile, then said: 

“It is not surpassable for magnitude, since its metes and bounds are the metes and bounds of the universe itself; and it seems to me that it almost accounts for a thing which is otherwise nearly unaccountable—­the origin of the sacred legends of the Hindoos.  Perhaps they dream them, and then honestly believe them to be divine revelations of fact.  It looks like that, for the legends are built on so vast a scale that it does not seem reasonable that plodding priests would happen upon such colossal fancies when awake.”

He told some of the legends, and said that they were implicitly believed by all classes of Hindoos, including those of high social position and intelligence; and he said that this universal credulity was a great hindrance to the missionary in his work.  Then he said something like this: 

“At home, people wonder why Christianity does not make faster progress in India.  They hear that the Indians believe easily, and that they have a natural trust in miracles and give them a hospitable reception.  Then they argue like this:  since the Indian believes easily, place Christianity before them and they must believe; confirm its truths by the biblical miracles, and they will no longer doubt, The natural deduction is, that as Christianity makes but indifferent progress in India, the fault is with us:  we are not fortunate in presenting the doctrines and the miracles.