AMERICAN HUMOR

Evening Star, Issue 12179, 25 April 1904, Page 2

AMERICAN HUMOR

The writer of an article on American provincial humor in 'Chambers's Journal' says that the claim of Boston to be the lit«rary and intellectual centre of the United States furnishes the scribes of all the rest of the country with opportunities of sarcasm. It is a Boston clergyman who is reported to have declared that Lot's wife was transformed into a monolith of chloride of sodium.

| "I ™ agent, sir," says the traveller, " for the ' Great American Universal Encyclopaedia of History, Biography, Art, Science, and Literature,' completes in two hundred volumes ■" "Don't need it," replies the business man; "I married a Boston girl." But Boston is sometimes able to retaliate upon her more aggressive juniors. A Bostonian, so it is related, was riding with a Chicago lady on the elevated railway in the city. "It is an enormous citv, is it not?" she remarked, with a proud sigh. " Enormous?" repeated the Bostonian. "The enormity of it is not to be estimated."

More pugent still is the application of a story told of the daughter of a professor at Cornell University who was about to move westward. The night before they left the little girl added these words to her usual prayer: " Good-bye, God ; we're going to Chicago." Philadelphia has somehow acquired the reputation—quite unwarranted—of being the slowest city in America. One would like to know what Benjamin Franklin, certainly a man of vigor and enterprise, would have thought of such jests as the following at tho city whose fame was so closely associated with his own : "Yes, poor fellow, he was once verv prosperous, but he failed in business." ""How so?" "Tried to establish a 'quick lunch' restaurant in Philadelphia." Again: "I understand that it was pretty slow at Mrs De Stvles's party?" " Slow ! Whv, it was as slow as playing chws on a freight train going through Philadelphia on a Sunday."