If Bishop Chuff desired to make people stop thinking about alcohol, his plan of seizing them and shutting them up in the grounds of the Federal Home at Cana was a quaint way of attaining this purpose.  For all the victims, who had been suddenly arrested in the course of their daily concerns, accused (before a rum-head court martial) of harboring illicit alcoholic desires, and driven over to Cana in crowded motor-trucks, now had very little else to brood about.  In the golden light and fragrance of a summer afternoon, here they were surrounded by all the apparatus to restrain alcoholic excess, and not even the slightest exhilaration of spirit to justify the depressing scene.  It was annoying to see frequent notices such as:  This Entrance for Brandy-Topers; or Vodka Patients in This Ward; or Inmates Must Not Bite Off the Door-Knobs.  It seemed carrying a jest too far when these citizens, most of whom had not even smelt a drink in two years, found themselves billeted into padded cells and confronted by rows of strait-jackets.  Moreover, the Home had lain unused for many months:  it was dusty, dilapidated, and of a moldy savor.  Some of the unwilling visitors, finding that the grounds included a strip of sandy beach, took their ordeal with reasonable philosophy.  “Since we are to be slaves,” they said, “at least let’s have some serf bathing.”  And donning (with a shudder) the rather gruesome padded bathing suits they found in the lockers, they went off for a swim.  Others, of a humorous turn, derived a certain rudimentary amusement in studying the garden marked Reserved for Patients with Insane Delusions, where they found a very excellent relief-model of the battleground of the Marne, laid out by a former inmate who had imagined himself to be General Joffre.  But most of them stood about in groups, talking bitterly.

Quimbleton, therefore, found a receptive audience for his Spartacus scheme of organizing this band of downtrodden victims into a fighting force.  He gathered them into the dining-hall of the Home and addressed them in spirited language.

“My friends” (he said), “unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I feel it my duty to administer a few remarks on the subject of our present situation.

“And the first thought that comes to my mind, candidly, is this, that we must give Bishop Chuff credit for a quality we never imagined him to possess.  That quality, gentlemen, is a sense of humor.  I hear some dissent; and yet it seems to me to be somewhat humorous that this gathering, composed of men who were accustomed, in the good old days, to carry their liquor like gentlemen, should now, when they have been cold sober for two years, be incarcerated in this humiliating place, surrounded by the morbid relics of those weaker souls who found their grog too strong for them.

“I say therefore that we must give Bishop Chuff credit for a sense of humor.  It makes him all the more deadly enemy.  Yet I think we will have the laugh on him yet, in a manner I shall presently describe.  For the Bishop has what may be denominated a single-tract mind.  He undoubtedly imagines that we will submit tamely to this outrage.  He has surrounded us with guards.  He expects us to be meek.  In my experience, the meek inherit the dearth.  Let us not be meek!”