sheets. Keener or more interested partisans I never saw; but at the
same time I never saw a more good-humored crowd. If I encountered one
policeman that night that was all I did see; and the police reports
next morning, in a city of a million inhabitants let loose in the
streets on a public holiday, reported the arrest of five drunk men and
one pickpocket!

Election bets are often made payable in practical jokes instead of in
current coin. Thus, after election day you will meet a defeated
Republican wheeling his Democratic friend through the chuckling crowd
in a wheelbarrow, or walking down the Bond Street of his native town
with a coal-black African laundress on his arm. But in such forms of
jesting as in "White Hat Day," at the Stock Exchange of New York,
Americans come perilously near the Londoner's standard of the truly
funny.

In comparing American humour with English we must take care that we
take class for class. Those of us who find it difficult to get up a
laugh at _Judge_, or Bill Nye, or Josh Billings, have at least to
admit that they are not quite so feeble as _Ally Sloper_ and other
cognate English humorists. When we reach the level of Artemus Ward, Ik
Marvel, H.C. Bunner, Frank Stockton, and Mark Twain, we may find that
we have no equally popular contemporary humorists of equal excellence;
and these are emphatically humorists of a pure American type. If
humour of a finer point be demanded it seems to me that there are few,
if any, living English writers who can rival the delicate satiric
powers of a Henry James or the subtle suggestiveness of Mr. W.D.
Howells' farces, for an analogy to which we have to look to the best
French work of the kind. But this takes us beyond the scope of this
chapter, which deals merely with the humour of the "Man on the Cars."