“With pleasure,” said Quimbleton.  “Will you put it down in black and white, please?”

He secured the Bishop’s signature to a document giving instructions for the necessary legislation to be passed.  Folding the precious paper in his pocket, Quimbleton faced the black-browed Bishop.  He held Theodolinda by the hand.

“I am sorry,” he said, “that I should have forgotten to bring a ring with me.  If I had done so, you might have married us here and now.  At least you will not refuse us your blessing?”

“Blessings have been abolished,” said Chuff in a voice of exasperation.  “Now inform me what it is that I have forgotten to condemn.”

“Work!” cried Quimbleton, and the three ran hastily from the room.

CHAPTER IX

THE ELECTION

In the days following Quimbleton’s coup Chuff was in seclusion.  It was rumored that he was ill; it was rumored that the sounds of breaking furniture had been heard by the neighbors on Caraway Street.  But at any rate the Bishop lived up to his word.  Orders over his signature went to Congress, and vast sums of money were appropriated immediately for

The establishment and maintenance of a national park with suitable buildings and appurtenances wherein might be maintained an elected individual in a state of freedom, with access to alcoholic beverages, in order that successive generations might view for themselves the devastating effects of alcohol upon the human system.

No political campaign was ever contested with more zeal and zest than that which led up to the election of the Perpetual Souse.  Life had grown rather dreary under the innumerable prohibitions of the Chuff regime, and the citizens welcomed the excitement of the campaign as a notable diversion.  Quimbleton appointed himself chairman of the committee to nominate Bleak, and the editor (acting under his friend’s instructions) had hardly begun to deny vigorously that he had any intention of being a candidate before he found himself plunged into a bewildering vortex of meetings, speeches, and confessions of faith.  Marching clubs, properly outfitted with two-quart silk tiles and frock coats, were spatting their way plumply down the Boulevard.  Torchlight processions tinted the night; ward picnics strewed the shells of hard-boiled eggs on the lawns of suburban amusement parks, while Bleak, very ill at ease, was kissing adhesive babies and autographing tissue napkins and smiling horribly as he whirled about with the grandmothers in the agony of the carrousel.  More than once, reeling with the endless circuit of a painted merry-go-round charger, the perplexed candidate became so confused that he kissed the paper napkin and autographed the baby.