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But perhaps the skipper was a humorist: or perhaps a prophet, reminding people of the seriousness of life by this preposterous token. At Creil, as at Noyon, Saint Joseph seemed a favourite saint on the score of punctuality. Day and hour can be specified; and grateful people do not fail to specify them on a votive tablet, when prayers have been punctually and neatly answered.
It was not from what he said, for he was not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller; but he could now and then drop the fittest word, and with a glance or smile of friendly intelligence express the appreciation of another's fit word which goes far to establish for a man the character of boon humorist.
A year earlier, on the famous soldier's return from his trip around the world, a great birthday banquet had been given him in Chicago, at which Mark Twain's speech had been the event of the evening. The colonel who long before had chased the young pilot-soldier through the Mississippi bottoms had become his conquering hero, and Grant's admiration for America's foremost humorist was most hearty.
We had been enjoying Bethesda for a few weeks, but had not yet got past our daily pride in it, when one hot evening in the latter part of June who should come driving into the yard but David Barker, "the Burns of Maine," a poet and humorist of state-wide renown. The old Squire had met him several times; but his visit that night was accidental.
They had given me so much pleasure that I was vexed with the indifference with which some of my friends laid the works of the great humorist aside. There were rarely any conversations on the more serious scientific subjects among the members of the corps, though it did not lack talented young men, and some of the older ones were industrious.
Yet in them, an odd contradiction, there lurked a possibility of humorous twinkling. The man was capable perhaps of the broad tolerance of the great humorist, certainly of very acute perception of life's minor incongruities. His thin lips were habitually pressed together, giving a suggestion of strength to the set of his mouth.
And what noble figures on those front seats; Pericles, with Aspasia beside him, and all his friends Anaxagoras the sage, Phidias the sculptor, and many another immortal artist; and somewhere among the free citizens, perhaps beside his father Sophroniscus the sculptor, a short, square, pug- nosed boy of ten years old, looking at it all with strange eyes "who will be one day," so said the Pythoness at Delphi, "the wisest man in Greece" sage, metaphysician, humorist, warrior, patriot, martyr for his name is Socrates.
I may laugh mayn't I?" As the discomfited humorist fell again to the rear amidst the laughter of the others, Mrs. Brimmer continued naively to Senor Perkins, "Of course, as Don Miguel is a widower, there must be daughters or sisters-in-law who will meet us. Why, the priest, you know even he must have nieces. Really, it's a serious question if we are to accept his hospitality in a social way.
For the poor artist is expected to please all down to the youngest child, and perhaps that one most, for she often rules the rest. And people do not too much consider the feelings of painters. I knew an artist, a great humorist, who spent much time at the court at Lisbon. He had to paint a child, I believe the Prince of the Brazils.
Lescott, tremendously interested in his experiment, began to fear that the boy's too great somberness of disposition would defeat the very earnestness from which it sprang. So, one morning, the landscape-maker went to the telephone, and called for the number of a friend whom he rightly believed to be the wisest man, and the greatest humorist, in New York.
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