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<h1> SUNSHINE SKETCHES OF A LITTLE TOWN </h1>
<h2> By Stephen Leacock</h2>
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<h2> Preface </h2>
<p>I know no way in which a writer may more fittingly introduce his work to
the public than by giving a brief account of who and what he is. By this
means some of the blame for what he has done is very properly shifted to
the extenuating circumstances of his life.</p>
<p>I was born at Swanmoor, Hants, England, on December 30, 1869. I am not
aware that there was any particular conjunction of the planets at the
time, but should think it extremely likely. My parents migrated to Canada
in 1876, and I decided to go with them. My father took up a farm near Lake
Simcoe, in Ontario. This was during the hard times of Canadian farming,
and my father was just able by great diligence to pay the hired men and,
in years of plenty, to raise enough grain to have seed for the next year's
crop without buying any. By this process my brothers and I were inevitably
driven off the land, and have become professors, business men, and
engineers, instead of being able to grow up as farm labourers. Yet I saw
enough of farming to speak exuberantly in political addresses of the joy
of early rising and the deep sleep, both of body and intellect, that is
induced by honest manual toil.</p>
<p>I was educated at Upper Canada College, Toronto, of which I was head boy
in 1887. From there I went to the University of Toronto, where I graduated
in 1891. At the University I spent my entire time in the acquisition of
languages, living, dead, and half-dead, and knew nothing of the outside
world. In this diligent pursuit of words I spent about sixteen hours of
each day. Very soon after graduation I had forgotten the languages, and
found myself intellectually bankrupt. In other words I was what is called
a distinguished graduate, and, as such, I took to school teaching as the
only trade I could find that need neither experience nor intellect. I
spent my time from 1891 to 1899 on the staff of Upper Canada College, an
experience which has left me with a profound sympathy for the many gifted
and brilliant men who are compelled to spend their lives in the most
dreary, the most thankless, and the worst paid profession in the world. I
have noted that of my pupils, those who seemed the laziest and the least
enamoured of books are now rising to eminence at the bar, in business, and
in public life; the really promising boys who took all the prizes are now
able with difficulty to earn the wages of a clerk in a summer hotel or a
deck hand on a canal boat.</p>
<p>In 1899 I gave up school teaching in disgust, borrowing enough money to
live upon for a few months, and went to the University of Chicago to study
economics and political science. I was soon appointed to a Fellowship in
political economy, and by means of this and some temporary employment by
McGill University, I survived until I took the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy in 1903. The meaning of this degree is that the recipient of
instruction is examined for the last time in his life, and is pronounced
completely full. After this, no new ideas can be imparted to him.</p>
<p>From this time, and since my marriage, which had occurred at this period,
I have belonged to the staff of McGill University, first as lecturer in
Political Science, and later as head of the department of Economics and
Political Science. As this position is one of the prizes of my profession,
I am able to regard myself as singularly fortunate. The emolument is so
high as to place me distinctly above the policemen, postmen, street-car
conductors, and other salaried officials of the neighbourhood, while I am
able to mix with the poorer of the business men of the city on terms of
something like equality. In point of leisure, I enjoy more in the four
corners of a single year than a business man knows in his whole life. I
thus have what the business man can never enjoy, an ability to think, and,
what is still better, to stop thinking altogether for months at a time.</p>
<p>I have written a number of things in connection with my college life—a
book on Political Science, and many essays, magazine articles, and so on.
I belong to the Political Science Association of America, to the Royal
Colonial Institute, and to the Church of England. These things, surely,
are a proof of respectability. I have had some small connection with
politics and public life. A few years ago I went all round the British
Empire delivering addresses on Imperial organization. When I state that
these lectures were followed almost immediately by the Union of South
Africa, the Banana Riots in Trinidad, and the Turco-Italian war, I think
the reader can form some idea of their importance. In Canada I belong to
the Conservative party, but as yet I have failed entirely in Canadian
politics, never having received a contract to build a bridge, or make a
wharf, nor to construct even the smallest section of the Transcontinental
Railway. This, however, is a form of national ingratitude to which one
becomes accustomed in this Dominion.</p>
<p>Apart from my college work, I have written two books, one called "Literary
Lapses" and the other "Nonsense Novels." Each of these is published by
John Lane (London and New York), and either of them can be obtained,
absurd though it sounds, for the mere sum of three shillings and sixpence.
Any reader of this preface, for example, ridiculous though it appears,
could walk into a bookstore and buy both of these books for seven
shillings. Yet these works are of so humorous a character that for many
years it was found impossible to print them. The compositors fell back
from their task suffocated with laughter and gasping for air. Nothing but
the intervention of the linotype machine—or rather, of the kind of
men who operate it—made it possible to print these books. Even now
people have to be very careful in circulating them, and the books should
never be put into the hands of persons not in robust health.</p>
<p>Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous
nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the
serious labours of the economist. My own experience is exactly the other
way. The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and
figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific
treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into
the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something
out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous
contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between.
Personally, I would sooner have written "Alice in Wonderland" than the
whole Encyclopaedia Britannica.</p>
<p>In regard to the present work I must disclaim at once all intentions of
trying to do anything so ridiculously easy as writing about a real place
and real people. Mariposa is not a real town. On the contrary, it is about
seventy or eighty of them. You may find them all the way from Lake
Superior to the sea, with the same square streets and the same maple trees
and the same churches and hotels, and everywhere the sunshine of the land
of hope.</p>
<p>Similarly, the Reverend Mr. Drone is not one person but about eight or
ten. To make him I clapped the gaiters of one ecclesiastic round the legs
of another, added the sermons of a third and the character of a fourth,
and so let him start on his way in the book to pick up such individual
attributes as he might find for himself. Mullins and Bagshaw and Judge
Pepperleigh and the rest are, it is true, personal friends of mine. But I
have known them in such a variety of forms, with such alternations of tall
and short, dark and fair, that, individually, I should have much ado to
know them. Mr. Pupkin is found whenever a Canadian bank opens a branch in
a county town and needs a teller. As for Mr. Smith, with his two hundred
and eighty pounds, his hoarse voice, his loud check suit, his diamonds,
the roughness of his address and the goodness of his heart,—all of
this is known by everybody to be a necessary and universal adjunct of the
hotel business.</p>
<p>The inspiration of the book,—a land of hope and sunshine where
little towns spread their square streets and their trim maple trees beside
placid lakes almost within echo of the primeval forest,—is large
enough. If it fails in its portrayal of the scenes and the country that it
depicts the fault lies rather with an art that is deficient than in an
affection that is wanting.</p>
<p>Stephen Leacock. McGill University, June, 1912.</p>
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