180 WINTER SUNSHINE 



certain directions, or shall I say dei^raved, than 

 similar crowds in our great cities. They are easily 

 pleased, and laugh at the simple and childlike, but 

 there is little that hints of an impure taste, or of 

 abnormal appetites. I often smiled at the tameness 

 and simplicity of the amusements, but my sense of 

 fitness, or proportion, or decency was never once 

 outraged. They always stop short of a certain point, 

 — the point where wit degenerates into mockery, 

 and liberty into license: nature is never put to 

 shame, and will commonly bear much more. Espe- 

 cially to the American sense did their humorous and 

 comic strokes, their negro-minstrelsy and attempts 

 at Yankee comedy, seem in a minor key. There 

 was not enough irreverence and slang and coarse rib- 

 aldry, in the whole evening's entertainment, to have 

 seasoned one line of some of our most popular comic 

 poetry. But the music, and the gymnastic, acro- 

 batic, and other feats, were of a very high order. 

 And I will say here that the characteristic flavor of 

 the humor and fun-making of the average English 

 people, as it impressed my sense, is what one gets in 

 Sterne, — very human and stomachic, and entirely 

 free from the contempt and superciliousness of most 

 current writers. I did not get one whiff of Dickens 

 anywhere. No doubt it is there in some form or 

 other, but it is not patent, or even appreciable, to 

 the sense of such an observer as I am. 



I was not less pleased by the simple good-will 

 and bonhomie that pervaded the crowd. There is 

 in all these gatherings an indiscriminate mingling of 



