The negro—­Whut’s dat you say?  Whut—­whut is a jugged rock?

The Scotchman (forgetting his accent)—­Why, a rock with a jug on it, old chap. (A stage wait to let that soak into them in all its full strength.) A rock with a jug on it would be a jugged rock, wouldn’t it—­eh?

The pause had been sufficient—­they had it now.  And from all parts of the house a whoop of unrestrained joy went up.

Witnessing such spectacles as this, the American observer naturally begins to think that the English in mass cannot see a joke that is the least bit subtle.  Nevertheless, however, and to the contrary notwithstanding—­as Colonel Bill Sterritt, of Texas, used to say—­England has produced the greatest natural humorists in the world and some of the greatest comedians, and for a great many years has supported the greatest comic paper printed in the English language, and that is Punch.  Also, at an informal Saturday-night dinner in a well-known London club I heard as much spontaneous repartee from the company at large, and as much quiet humor from the chairman, as I ever heard in one evening anywhere; but if you went into that club on a weekday you might suppose somebody was dead and laid out there, and that everybody about the premises had gone into deep mourning for the deceased.  If any member of that club had dared then to crack a joke they would have expelled him—­as soon as they got over the shock of the bounder’s confounded cheek.  Saturday night?  Yes.  Monday afternoon?  Never!  And there you are!

Speaking of Punch reminds me that we were in London when Punch, after giving the matter due consideration for a period of years, came out with a colored jacket on him.  If the Prime Minister had done a Highland fling in costume at high noon in Oxford Circus it could not have created more excitement than Punch created by coming out with a colored cover.  Yet, to an American’s understanding, the change was not so revolutionary and radical as all that.  Punch’s well-known lineaments remained the same.  There was merely a dab of palish yellow here and there on the sheet; at first glance you might have supposed somebody else had been reading your copy of Punch at breakfastand had been careless in spooning up his soft-boiled egg.

They are our cousins, the English are; our cousins once removed, ’tis true—­see standard histories of the American Revolution for further details of the removing—­but they are kinsmen of ours beyond a doubt.  Even if there were no other evidences, the kinship between us would still be proved by the fact that the English are the only people except the Americans who look on red meat—­beef, mutton, ham—­as a food to be eaten for the taste of the meat itself; whereas the other nations of the earth regard it as a vehicle for carrying various sauces, dressings and stuffings southward to the stomach.  But, to the notice of the American who is paying them his first visit, they certainly do offer some amazing contradictions.