"Do you think I would laugh at the bones of the Pilgrim Fathers, where are they? or burst into wild hilarity over the grave of Noah and his family?
"No, sir; their age and antiquity protect them. That is the way with your Phoenician joke.
"Another reason why I cannot laugh at it is this: I am not a very easy and extemporaneous laughter, anyway. I am generally shrouded in gloom, especially when I am in hot pursuit of a wild and skittish joke for my own use. It takes a good, fair, average joke that hasn't been used much to make me laugh easy, and besides, I have used up the fund of laugh that I had laid aside for that particular joke. It has, in fact, overdrawn some now, and is behind.
"I do not wish to intrench on the fund that I have concluded to offer as a purse for young jokes that have never made it in three minutes.
"I want to encourage green jokes, too, that have never trotted in harness before, and, besides, I must insist on using my scanty fund of laugh on jokes of the nineteenth century. I have got to draw the line somewhere.
"If I were making a collection of antique jokes of the vintage of 1400 years B. C., or arranging and classifying little bon-mots of the time of Cleopatra or King Solomon, I would give you a handsome sum for this one of yours, but I am just trying to worry along and pay expenses, and trying to be polite to every one I meet, and laughing at lots of things that I don't want to laugh at, and I am going to quit it.
"That is why I have met your little witticism with cold and heartless gravity."