professor what it was.

He looked at it and said it was gneiss.

"Is it?" said I. "Well, if a small but energetic
youth had taken you on the back of the head
with it, you would not think it so nice!"

And then, O Squib, he set out to explain that he
meant "gneiss," not "nice!" The ignorance of
these English about a joke is really wonderful. It
is easy to see that they have never been brought
up on them. But perhaps there was some excuse
for the professor that day, for he was the president
_pro tem._ of our projected temperance society, and
as such he head been making a quantitative and
qualitative analysis of another kind of quartz.

So much for the chemist or metallurgist or
something scientific. The gentleman and I get on
better. His name is Beaver, which he persists
in spelling Beauvoir. Ridiculous, isn't it? How
easy it is to see that the English have never had
the advantage of a good common-school education--so
few of them can spell. Here's a man don't
know how to spell his own name. And this shows
how the race over there on the little island is degenerating.
It was not so in other days. Shakspere,
for instance, not only knew how to spell his
own name, but--and this is another proof of his