Excerpt from Spare Hours

If man is made to mourn, he also, poor fellow! and without doubt therefore, is made to laugh. He needs it all, and he gets it. For human nature may say of herself, in the words of the ballad, "Werena my heart licht, I wad die."

Man is the only animal that laughs; it is as peculiar to him as his chin and his hippocampus minor. The perception of a joke, the smile, the sense of the ludicrous, the quiet laugh, the roar of laughter, are all our own; and we may be laughed as well as tickled to death, as in the story of the French nun of mature years, who, during a vehement fit of laughter, was observed by her sisters to sit suddenly still and look very "gash" (like the Laird of Garscadden), this being considered a further part of the joke, when they found she was elsewhere.

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