Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town | Page 5

Political Science Association of America, to the
Royal Colonial Institute, and to the Church of England. These things,
surely, are a proof of respectability. I have had some small connection
with politics and public life. A few years ago I went all round the
British Empire delivering addresses on Imperial organization. When I
state that these lectures were followed almost immediately by the
Union of South Africa, the Banana Riots in Trinidad, and the
Turco-Italian war, I think the reader can form some idea of their
importance. In Canada I belong to the Conservative party, but as yet I
have failed entirely in Canadian politics, never having received a

contract to build a bridge, or make a wharf, nor to construct even the
smallest section of the Transcontinental Railway. This, however, is a
form of national ingratitude to which one becomes accustomed in this
Dominion.
Apart from my college work, I have written two books, one called
"Literary Lapses" and the other "Nonsense Novels." Each of these is
published by John Lane (London and New York), and either of them
can be obtained, absurd though it sounds, for the mere sum of three
shillings and sixpence. Any reader of this preface, for example,
ridiculous though it appears, could walk into a bookstore and buy both
of these books for seven shillings. Yet these works are of so humorous
a character that for many years it was found impossible to print them.
The compositors fell back from their task suffocated with laughter and
gasping for air. Nothing but the intervention of the linotype
machine--or rather, of the kind of men who operate it--made it possible
to print these books. Even now people have to be very careful in
circulating them, and the books should never be put into the hands of
persons not in robust health.
Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these
humorous nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable
to perform the serious labours of the economist. My own experience is
exactly the other way. The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by
facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a
scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical
enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to
write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake,
is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments,
few and far between. Personally, I would sooner have written "Alice in
Wonderland" than the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica.
In regard to the present work I must disclaim at once all intentions of
trying to do anything so ridiculously easy as writing about a real place
and real people. Mariposa is not a real town. On the contrary, it is about
seventy or eighty of them. You may find them all the way from Lake
Superior to the sea, with the same square streets and the same maple
trees and the same churches and hotels, and everywhere the sunshine of
the land of hope.
Similarly, the Reverend Mr. Drone is not one person but about eight or

ten. To make him I clapped the gaiters of one ecclesiastic round the
legs of another, added the sermons of a third and the character of a
fourth, and so let him start on his way in the book to pick up such
individual attributes as he might find for himself. Mullins and Bagshaw
and Judge Pepperleigh and the rest are, it is true, personal friends of
mine. But I have known them in such a variety of forms, with such
alternations of tall and short, dark and fair, that, individually, I should
have much ado to know them. Mr. Pupkin is found whenever a
Canadian bank opens a branch in a county town and needs a teller. As
for Mr. Smith, with his two hundred and eighty pounds, his hoarse
voice, his loud check suit, his diamonds, the roughness of his address
and the goodness of his heart,--all of this is known by everybody to be
a necessary and universal adjunct of the hotel business.
The inspiration of the book,--a land of hope and sunshine where little
towns spread their square streets and their trim maple trees beside
placid lakes almost within echo of the primeval forest,--is large enough.
If it fails in its portrayal of the scenes and the country that it depicts the
fault lies rather with an art that is deficient than in an affection that is
wanting.
Stephen Leacock. McGill University, June, 1912.

ONE
The Hostelry of Mr. Smith
I don't know whether you know Mariposa. If not, it is of no
consequence, for if you know Canada at all, you are probably well
acquainted with a dozen towns