During one of their expeditions together
he noticed that a camp meeting was to be held, and out of curiosity he
persuaded Reuben to attend it with him. Perched on a back seat, they
were watching the scene when an elderly Evangelical sister placed
herself beside the old hunter, laid her hand on his arm, and asked him
if he loved Jesus. He pondered for some moments and then replied thus:
"Waal, ma'am, I can't go so far as to say that I love Him. I can't go so
far as that. But, by gosh, I'll say this--I ain't got nothin' agin Him."
The funniest spontaneous thing I heard said was the remark of a farmer
in the Adirondacks in reply to my question, Had they recovered up there,
from the recent war? "Yes," he said, they had; adding brightly, "Quite a
war, wasn't it?"
In a manner of speaking all Americans are humourists. Just as all French
people are wits by reason of the epigrammatic structure of their
language, so are all Americans humourists by reason of the national
stores of picturesque slang and analogy to which they have access. I
think that this tendency to resort to a common stock instead of striving
after individual exactitude and colour is to be deplored. It discourages
thought where thought should be encouraged. Adults are, of course,
beyond redemption, but parents might at least do something about it with
their children. One of the cleverest American writers whom I met made no
effort whatever to get beyond these accepted phrases as he narrated one
racy incident after another.
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