they were dying by thousands from frost.  But these heroic and devoted people struggled on, believing that they were becoming acclimated faster than the climate was becoming insupportable.  Those called away on business were even afflicted with nostalgia, and with a fatal infatuation returned to grill or freeze, according to the season of their arrival.  Finally there was no summer at all, though the last flash of heat slew several millions and set most of their cities afire, and winter reigned eternal.

“The Smugwumps were now keenly sensible of the perils environing them, and, abandoning their homes, endeavored to reach their kindred, the Californians, on the western side of the continent in what is now your Majesty’s ever-blessed realm.  But it was too late:  the snow growing deeper and deeper day by day, besieged them in their towns and dwellings, and they were unable to escape.  The last one of them perished about the year 1943, and may God have mercy on his fool soul!”

To this dispatch the Ahkoond replied that it was the royal opinion that the Smugwumps were served very well right.

Some weeks later I reported thus: 

“Sire: The country which your Majesty’s munificence is enabling your devoted servant to explore extends southward and southwestward from Smugwumpia many hundreds of prastams, its eastern and southern borders being the Wintry Sea and the Fiery Gulf, respectively.  The population in ancient times was composed of Whites and Blacks in about equal numbers and of about equal moral worth—­at least that is the record on the dial of my ethnograph when set for the twentieth century and given a southern exposure.  The Whites were called Crackers and the Blacks known as Coons.

“I find here none of the barrenness and desolation characterizing the land of the ancient Pukes, and the climate is not so rigorous and thrilling as that of the country of the late Smugwumps.  It is, indeed, rather agreeable in point of temperature, and the soil being fertile exceedingly, the whole land is covered with a dense and rank vegetation.  I have yet to find a square smig of it that is open ground, or one that is not the lair of some savage beast, the haunt of some venomous reptile, or the roost of some offensive bird.  Crackers and Coons alike are long extinct, and these are their successors.

“Nothing could be more forbidding and unwholesome than these interminable jungles, with their horrible wealth of organic life in its most objectionable forms.  By repeated observations with the necrohistoriograph I find that the inhabitants of this country, who had always been more or less dead, were wholly extirpated contemporaneously with the disastrous events which swept away the Galoots, the Pukes and the Smugwumps.  The agency of their effacement was an endemic disorder known as yellow fever.  The ravages of this frightful disease were of frequent recurrence, every point of the country being a center of infection; but in some