Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: tact than the others, and he kneeled beside it, intelligently asking: "Wass dere a excident?" The man inquired of was too nearly dead to give the sort of answer that sort of fool question so richly deserves, so he patiently whispered, "Yes." "Dit der logomotif hit der automopeel?" Another whispered, "Yes." "Dit der enchiner plow his vissle?" "No." "Has der claim achent been along yet?" "No." "Let me lay down peside you!" A Mantjfacturee I come to you tonight as a manufacturer. A manufacturer—as anybody knows who knows enough to go in out of a heavy rain—is one who collects and selects raw materials and fashions them into a finished product for the use or pleasure of his fellow-mortals. Theraw materials I collect, from which I select, and incidentally largely and enthusiastically reject, are the little bits of quaintness and oddity and human inconsistency I see and hear and imagine as I wander about the country, and the finished product is the humor of commerce—the kind you buy in newspapers, magazines and other periodicals and on the platform. All I give you is of my own manufacture—not always manufactured from my own raw material. Some of it is not. I use only the stories and incidents that best illustrate the kinds of humor I mention in a sort of attempt at classification of humor. You have heard some if not all of my stories before, for I was a manufacturer long before I became a peddler. And there never yet was an author who did not consciously or unconsciously use material that was old. Mark Twain made a world-wide reputation as an original humorist by writing "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," and afterward found the story in all chapter{Section 4its essentials in the Ancient Greek. Kipling, the greatest author of modern times, frankl... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.