rs on Caraway Street. But at any
rate the Bishop lived up to his word. Orders over his signature went to
Congress, and vast sums of money were appropriated immediately for

The establishment and maintenance of a national park with suitable
buildings and appurtenances wherein might be maintained an elected
individual in a state of freedom, with access to alcoholic beverages,
in order that successive generations might view for themselves the
devastating effects of alcohol upon the human system.

No political campaign was ever contested with more zeal and zest than
that which led up to the election of the Perpetual Souse. Life had
grown rather dreary under the innumerable prohibitions of the Chuff
regime, and the citizens welcomed the excitement of the campaign as a
notable diversion. Quimbleton appointed himself chairman of the
committee to nominate Bleak, and the editor (acting under his friend's
instructions) had hardly begun to deny vigorously that he had any
intention of being a candidate before he found himself plunged into a
bewildering vortex of meetings, speeches, and confessions of faith.
Marching clubs, properly outfitted with two-quart silk tiles and frock
coats, were spatting their way plumply down the Boulevard. Torchlight
processions tinted the night; ward picnics strewed the shells of
hard-boiled eggs on the lawns of suburban amusement parks, while Bleak,
very ill at ease, was kissing adhesive babies and autographing tissue
napkins and smiling horribly as he whirled about with the grandmothers
in the agony of the carrousel. More than once, reeling with the endless
circuit of a painted merry-go-round charger, the perplexed candidate
became so confused that he kissed the paper napkin and autographed the
baby.

He found Quimbleton a stern ringleader. Virgil was not satisfied with
the old-fashioned method of stumping the country from the taff-rail of
a Pullman car, and insisted on strapping Bleak into the cockpit of a
biplane and flying him from city to city. They would land in some
central square, and the candidate, deafened and half-frozen, would
stammer a few halting remarks. He felt it rather keenly that Quimbleton
looked down on his lack of oratorical gift, and it was a frequent
humiliation that when words did not prosper on his tongue his impatient
pilot would turn on the motors and zoom off into space in the very
middle of a sentence.

Nevertheless, the campaign went famously. Bleak had one considera