crash of laughter which echoed among the stars. Whenever Mark Twain
conceived a humorous idea, he seemed capable of extracting from it
infinite complications of successive and cumulative comedy. This humour
seemed like the mental functionings of some mad, yet inevitably logical
jester; it grew from more to more, from extravagance to extravagance,
until reason itself tired and gave over. Such explosive stories as 'How
I Edited an Agricultural Paper', 'A Genuine Mexican Plug', the
deciphering of the Horace Greeley correspondence, 'The Facts in the Case
of the Great Beef Contract, and many another, as Mr. Chesterton has
pointed out, have one tremendous essential of great art. "The
excitement mounts up perpetually; they grow more and more comic, as a
tragedy should grow more and more tragic. The rack, tragic or comic,
goes round until something breaks inside a man. In tragedy it is his
heart, or perhaps his stiff neck. In farce I do not quite know what it
is--perhaps his funny-bone is dislocated; perhaps his skull is slightly
cracked." Mark Twain's mountainous humour, of this early type, never
contains the element of final surprise, of the sudden, the unexpected,
the _imprevu_. We know what is coming, we surrender ourselves more and
more to the mood of the narrator, holding ourselves in reserve until
laughter, no longer to be restrained, bursts forth in a torrent of
undignified and explosive mirth. Perhaps no better example can be given
than the description of the sad fate of the camel in 'A Tramp Abroad'.

In Syria, at the head-waters of the Jordan, this camel had got hold of
his overcoat; and after he finished contemplating it as an article of
apparel, he began to inspect it as an article of diet. In his
inimitable manner, Mark describes the almost religious ecstasy of that
camel as it devoured his overcoat piecemeal--first one sleeve, then the
other, velvet collar, and finally the tails. All went well until the
camel struck a batch of manuscript--containing some of Mark's humorous