t saw that insulting question printed it
was estimated by one of the newspapers that 318,029 answered, "Present."
It was probably an exaggeration, as there doubtless was some repeating.

The Public Beauty Commission added fourteen to the list of utter
pulchritudes. Names, addresses, and portraits duly printed.

Elderly persons signing William H. P. or James G. C. in feminine
hand-writing asked the most conservative newspapers whether there was
nothing else fit to print but the disgusting travesty on charity or the
appalling vulgarity of immodest females.

The newspapers printed the letters. One of them, an afternoon sheet,
stopped printing names and portraits of the successful. It stopped for
one issue.

The circulation department interviewed the city department. The paper
went back, under a new city editor, to the business of printing all the
news that was fit to print.

The public demanded it.

On Sunday all the newspapers published the full list of one hundred
perfectly beautiful girls who alone would sell tickets admitting the
holder to the Mammoth Hunger Feast in the capacity of spectator. One to
each customer; no more.

On Monday they printed a facsimile of H. R.'s ticket.

[Illustration]

No. 1 was a coupon to be detached by the seller. It was in the nature of
both wages and a vote to show which was the perfectest of the perfect.
It would mean the only fair election ever held in America. Only one
ticket to each customer. There would be no rich man buying tickets by
the thousand, no stuffing of the ballot-boxes by the gallant commander
of a militia regiment, no undue influence on the part of high political
officials. No man could resist a perfectly beautiful girl who asked him
to buy one ticket for a quarter of a dollar, twenty-five cents.

No bribing by kisses was necessary.

The rest of the ticket was retained by the buyer. It bought what the
masses were beginning to speak of as the dandy belly-filler for a hungry
person who was warranted not to have any money. No. 3 coupon was to be
detached by the doorkeeper at Madison Square Garden and returned to the
ticket-buyer. If the holder of said coupon exercised his or her brains
he or she would receive ten thousand dollars in cash. Conditions
governing the collection of said ten thousand dollars would be published
on Saturday morning. It would _not_ be a lottery.

It now behooved charitable New-Yorkers to buy the tickets which would
feed all hungry per