at a bed of artificially coloured flowers, at a wood in which the
trees are plastered over with election addresses, etc. Look for the
reason, and you will see that you are once more thinking of a
masquerade. Here, however, the comic element is very faint; it is
too far from its source. If you wish to strengthen it, you must go
back to the source itself and contrast the derived image, that of a
masquerade, with the original one, which, be it remembered, was that
of a mechanical tampering with life. In "a nature that is
mechanically tampered with" we possess a thoroughly comic theme, on
which fancy will be able to play ever so many variations with the
certainty of successfully provoking the heartiest hilarity. You may
call to mind that amusing passage in Tartarin Sur Les Alpes, in
which Bompard makes Tartarin--and therefore also the reader to some
slight extent--accept the idea of a Switzerland choke-full of
machinery like the basement of the opera, and run by a company which
maintains a series of waterfalls, glaciers and artificial crevasses.
The same theme reappears, though transposed in quite another key, in
the Novel Notes of the English humorist, Jerome K. Jerome. An
elderly Lady Bountiful, who does not want her deeds of charity to
take up too much of her time, provides homes within easy hail of her
mansion for the conversion of atheists who have been specially
manufactured for her, so to speak, and for a number of honest folk
who have been made into drunkards so that she may cure them of their
failing, etc. There are comic phrases in which this theme is
audible, like a distant echo, coupled with an ingenuousness, whether
sincere or affected, which acts as accompaniment. Take, as an
instance, the remark made by a lady whom Cassini, the astronomer,
had invited to see an eclipse of the moon. Arriving too late, she
said, "M. de Cassini, I know, will have the goodness to begin it all
over again, to please me." Or, take again the exclamation of one of