“Next to being a plenipotentiary, Popanilla preferred being a prisoner.  His daily meals consisted of every delicacy in season; a marble bath was ever at his service; a billiard-room and dumb-bells always ready; and his old friends, the most eminent physician, and the most celebrated practitioner in Hubbabub, called upon him daily to feel his pulse and look at his tongue.  These attentions authorized a hope that he might yet again be an ambassador; that his native land might still be discovered, and its resources still be developed; but when his gaoler told him that the rest of the prisoners were treated in a manner equally indulgent, because the Vraibleusians are the most humane people in the world, Popanilla’s spirits became somewhat depressed.”

“He was greatly consoled, however, by a daily visit from a body of the most beautiful, the most accomplished, and the most virtuous females in Hubbabub, who tasted his food to see that his cook did his duty, recommended him a plentiful use of pine-apple well peppered, and made him a present of a very handsome shirt, with worked frills and ruffles, to be hanged in.  This enchanting committee generally confined their attentions to murderers, and other victims of the passions, who were deserted in their hour of need by the rest of the society they had outraged; but Popanilla being a foreigner, a prince, and a plenipotentiary, and not ill-looking, naturally attracted a great deal of notice from those who desire the amelioration of their species.”

“Popanilla was so pleased with his mode of life, and had acquired such a taste for poetry, pine-apples, and pepper, since he had ceased to be an active member of society, that he applied to have his trial postponed, on the ground of the prejudice which had been excited against him by the public press.  As his trial was at present inconvenient to the government, the postponement was allowed on these grounds.”

In the meantime, up jumps a public instructor, Flummery Flam, who ascribes all the debt and distress to “a slight over-trading,” chatters about demand, supply, rent, wages, profit, and, as a temporary relief, suggests “emigration.”  “Flummery-Flammism triumphs, and every person, from the managers down to the chalk-chewing mechanics, attend lectures on that enlightening science.”

At length Popanilla’s trial comes on; the indictment is read; he is accused of stealing 219 camelopards; perceives that he has all the time been mistaken for another person:  he is, however, detained, on the judge of Fort Jobation informing him, that in order to be tried in his court for a modern offence of high treason, he must first be introduced by fiction of law as a stealer of camelopards, and then being in praesenti regio, in a manner, the business proceeds by a special power for an absolute offence.  This flummery is too much; but every body with whom Popanilla had conversed while in Vraibleusia is subpoenaed against him:  the judge is about to sum up, when a trumpet