position for all of us. If we withdrew the
freedom of the jungle His Majesty might go home in a huff and declare
war against us, and with Noah's Ark as the sum total of our navy, and
that built in a ten-acre lot thirty miles from the coast, and no army
of any sort standing or sitting, we could hardly afford a complication
of that kind. Our wisest counsellors were called together to consider
the situation, but they were all men given to many words and lovers of
disputation, so that what with the framing of the original resolution,
and the time consumed in debating the amendments offered thereto, it
was quite three months before any definite conclusion was reached, and
it was then found when the resolution came up to its final vote that
it had nothing whatever to do with the subject the conference was
called to discuss, but had been transformed into an Act providing for
an increased duty on guinea-pigs imported from Sumatra. From that day
to this I have had little belief in that kind of popular government
which provides for the election of public servants whose chief end and
aim seems to be to thwart the public will.

[Illustration: EXTRA!!]

It was then that my fellow-citizens, availing themselves of a certain
diplomacy of method which I was said to possess, called upon me to
undertake a personal interview with King Ptush, and to see what could
be done to stay his voracious appetite for the slaying of our
mammalia. Always ready to serve my fellows in their hour of need, I
undertook the mission, and appeared bright and early one morning at
his encampment, unannounced, thinking it better to seem to happen in
upon him in a neighborly fashion than to make a national affair of my
mission by coming formally and with official pomp into his presence.
At the hour of my arrival the great king was standing on the stump of
a red cedar, delivering a lecture to his entourage upon "The Whole
Duty of Man, With a Few Remarks About Everything Else." But even then
he was not neglectful of his opportunities as a Nimrod, for every now
and then he would punctuate his sentences with a shot at a casual bit
of fauna passing by, either on the earth or flying, never pausing in
his lecture, but nevertheless bringing to an untimely end thirty-eight
griffins, seven paralellopipedon, a gumshurhynicus, forty google-eyed
plutocratidae, and a herd of June-bugs grazing in a neighboring
pasture--the latter wholly domesticated, by the way, and used by thei