OCR Text |
Show Nations and Laughs. The world laughs, though the nations have different dif-ferent ways of showing mirth. - The Chinese laugh is not as hearty or as expressive as the European or American. It is oftener a titter than a genuine burst of merriment. There is little character or force in it. As for the Arabian laugh, we hear little lit-tle of its hilarious ring through the ages of mirth in the old world. The Arab is generally. a stolid fellow, fel-low, who must see good reason for a laugh or be surprised into it. In Persia a man who laughs is considered effeminate, but free license"; is given to female merriment. One reads of the grave Turk and the sober Egyptian, but it is not recorded that they have never moments of mirth, when' the fez bobs or the veil shakes under the pressure of. some particularly "good things." In Mohammed himself Christian writers have noticed cordiality and jo-coseness, jo-coseness, and they say there is a good, ringing laugh in the prophet, with all his seriousness. An American Ameri-can traveler in Europe remarks the Italian mirth as languid but musical, the German as deliberate, the French as spasmodic and uncertain, the upper class English as guarded and not always genuine, the lower class English as explosive, the Scotch of all classes as hearty, and the Irish as rollicking. |