constantly urged me to use it, quoting her own success. At last, with much
curiosity and some trepidation, I included it in a programme before people
with whom I was so closely in sympathy that no chill was likely to emanate
from their side. I told the story as well as I knew how, putting into it
more genuine effort than most stories can claim. The audience smiled
politely, laughed gently once or twice, relapsed into the mildest of
amusement. The most one could say was that the story was not a hopeless
failure. I tried it again, after study, and yet again; but the audiences
were all alike. And in my heart I should have been startled if they had
behaved otherwise, for all the time I was telling it I was conscious in my
soul that it was a stupid story! At last I owned my defeat to myself, and
put the thing out of mind.

Some time afterward, I happened to take out the notes of the story, and
idly looked them over; and suddenly, I do not know how, I got the point of
view! The salt of the humour was all at once on my lips; I felt the tickle
of the pure folly of it; it _was_ funny.

The next afternoon I told the story to a hundred or so children and as
many mothers,--and the battle was won. Chuckles punctuated my periods;
helpless laughter ran like an under-current below my narrative; it was a
struggle for me to keep sober, myself. The nonsense tale had found its own
atmosphere.

Now of course I had known all along that the humour of the story emanated
from its very exaggeration, its absurdly illogical smoothness. But I had
not _felt_ it. I did not really "see the joke." And that was why I could
not tell the story. I undoubtedly impressed my own sense of its fatuity on
every audience to which I gave it. The case is very clear.