  During the past week I have experienced the pleasure of an acquaintance with Laughing Sam, a character well known throughout the West. Samuel Thompson was introduced to me on Tuesday last, and, although he has a look of subdued pain and half concealed anguish, I soon found that he was capable of exhibiting the most wild and ungovernable mirth. Laughing Sam is employed by Surveyor Downey, and the latter has often told me how he wished that I could employ Sam by the month to laugh at what I might write, so that I could be encouraged. After the formalities of an introduction were over, we began to tell anecdotes in order to get Sam into a cheerful frame of mind. When one would get tired and lay off for a rest, some other one would come forward to the bat and tell some more humorous tales. But Sam had evidently heard all these anecdotes, and looked disgusted and fatigued and bored. Downey whispered to me that it wouldn't do; we must have something entirely different, and that I had better fix up one of those custom-made lies of mine, such as we used to tell at the boarding house in '75. I did so with some hesitation, but Sam kindly gave me his attention and cheered me with an occasional pleased grunt. Then I threw my whole soul into it. I put in all the pathos of which I am capable at certain parts, and then where it was grand and terrific I got up and sawed the air, and where it was ludicrous I enlarged upon it till Sam's eye began to glisten. By-and-by the fountains of the great deep opened, and Sam lay on the floor a quivering mass. Sometimes we thought he was dead, but then one leg would fly through the air and he would give a wild whoop of pain. Then, in a lucid moment, he would try to get up, but he would fall back again, and his lips would spasmodically relax and contract, and the air would be filled with a wild mixture of yells and whoops and gurgles and contortions. It was not what was said that made him laugh, but it was because his time had come to indulge in a little mirth. I tried the same story afterward on an ordinary laughter, and when I got through he was bathed in tears. So it wasn't the story. When Laughing Sam looks at his watch and sees that a large amount of mirthfulness is due he calmly puts away anything that may be near him of a fragile nature and proceeds to laugh in a way that shakes the stars loose in the firmament and disarranges the entire planetary world. This fall he has an engagement to laugh for Eli Perkins during the lecture season. Eli is to give him half the proceeds of the lectures and Sam has got to laugh whether he feels like it or not.
|
|
