The greatest humoristic after-dinner speaker in America to-day is Simeon Ford. How often have I laughed at and with him. Study his humor. Half of it is making fun at himself, his "bizarre, gothic style of architecture," and that kind of thing. He pokes fun, slyly, at himself, and watches the effect on other people. Instead of "guying" other, and sensitive, people--(notice, I say sensitive, _not_ sensible),--he guys himself, and the more absurd the picture he can draw of himself the more he seems to enjoy it. He is original, quaint, individualistic, truly funny, not a mere retailer of old chestnuts, warmed over at the brazier of his wit, but a creator, a real _maker_ of humor, and the result is people sit and laugh and laugh, and then laugh some more, and when it is all over go away wondering what it was all about. But there is no sarcasm, no sting, no malice in the fun, no one is hurt, everything is as harmless as the frolics of a young lamb.
So it was with dear little Marshall Wilder. Dear Marsh! how I loved him! Handicapped with a distorted body, his mind was as quick as lightning. How well I remember running in upon him in his bedroom in a hotel in Buffalo one morning and asking him to come down to a breakfast table of friends who had assembled to give me a "Good-by." Though he was not well, he hastily threw on his clothes, came down, and for an hour brightened our circle, with some of the most flashing, bright, and spontaneous wit I ever heard. Everybody was charmed, delighted, thrilled, for he sprang from gay to grave, laughter to tears, jollity to pathos so startlingly quick as to keep us with one hand to our eyes, wiping away the tears, when we had originally raised them to hide our wide-open, laughing mouths. He loved to make others happy; he was ever ready to plunge deep into the pool of simple-hearted pure fun. Who will ever forget that day when he, Elbert Hubbard, Von Liebich, with half a dozen or more of the brightest minds of the Continent, who were visiting at Roycroft together, planned to go to the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo. I was privileged to be of the number. We planned to go as a lot of country joskins, real "Hicks," with hayseed in our hair, and carrying our carpet-bags with us. As I was the only bewhiskered man of the "bunch," I was made the victim. I was to dress in country style, go down the "Midway"--or whatever the street of shows was called--and attract the attention of the "barkers" and draw their fire. Then the others were to saunter up and we, in turn, would open up our fire upon the barker. Can you imagine the results? We carried out the plan exactly as contemplated. I ate liquorice and let the juice flow down from the corners of my mouth, so that it looked like tobacco juice, I gaped at everything, and listened with wide-eyed wonder, I felt like a countryman, so now I looked like one, and I became, immediately, the butt of the jokes and jests of the "spieler" of the show before which I stood. I think I can fairly hold my own in such a combat, and the audience that was assembled, generally seemed to think so, but imagine the way the fur began to fly when Hubbard arrived and chipped in, and Marshall and Von, and Bert II, and each of the others. Talk about a stranger dog set on by a dozen home dogs--it was nothing, compared with the fun we had badgering and baiting that over-confident spieler. Then I moved on to the next stand, far enough away, however, so that no one was aware of our plot. The crowd soon "tumbled" and followed, and we repeated the game to the infinite amazement of the discomfited "barkers." It was the wildest revelry of good-natured, good-humored, spontaneous fun I have ever engaged in, and a thousand years can never efface its memory.