Dining Room Old Brewery Bay

" '...it was a fascinating business to watch them [the sketches] developing in the telling.'*  Typically, Leacock acted them with appropriate gestures, great gusto and evident self-appreciation.  Here was the raconteur in action.  Guests at the frequent dinner parties, over which Trix presided as a gracious hostess, remember how the host's chair was placed well back from the end of the table so that he could rise at any moment to walk up and down while making a point, as though he were in the classroom.
"In fact, this was the test to which he subjected most of his short bits and pieces.  He would read them aloud in his study or in the dining room to whatever audience he could assemble.  at Old Brewery Bay his favourite audience was his brother George, who was a well-known wit himself and the source of some of Stephen's material.  The two of them would go over the material, tossing ideas back and forth, laughing all the while, until Stephen felt that they had hit on the best possible form."

*editor B. K. Sandwell
~ David M. Legate, STEPHEN LEACOCK, A biography, 1970. Doubleday Canada Limited.

"Thus, in effect, the articles became conversation pieces in print, which accounts for Leacock's constant use of the first person singular.  In essence, his were oral compositions, and Sunshine Sketches is the supreme example of his chosen form.