d made
speeches to the people in advocacy of himself, all over the country. Even
more recently another has uttered his preferences in much the same way,
but with this difference: he did his speechmaking at his own home, the
ax-grinders in his interest rounding up audiences for him and herding them
before his door. One of the two corpses, too, was galvanized into a kind
of ghastly activity and became a talking automaton; but the other had been
too long dead. In a few years more the decent tradition that a man should
not blow his own horn will be obsolete in its application to the high
office, as it is to all the others, but the popular saying will lose none
of its currency for that.

To the American mind nothing can be more shocking than the Tamtonian
practice of openly soliciting political preferment and even paying money
to assist in securing it. With us such immodesty would be taken as proof
of the offender's unfitness to exercise the power which he asks for, or
bear the dignity which, in soliciting it, he belittles. Yet no Tamtonian
ever refused to take the hand of a man guilty of such conduct, and there
have been instances of fathers giving these greedy vulgarians the hands of
their daughters in marriage and thereby assisting to perpetuate the
species. The kind of government given by men who go about begging for the
right to govern can be more easily imagined than endured. In short, I
cannot help thinking that when, unable longer to bear with patience the
evils entailed by the vices and follies of its inhabitants, I sailed away
from the accursed island of Tamtonia, I left behind me the most pestilent
race of rascals and ignoramuses to be found anywhere in the universe; and
I never can sufficiently thank the divine Power who spared me the
disadvantage and shame of being one of them, and cast my lot in this
favored land of goodness and right reason, the blessed abode of public
morality and private worth--of liberty, conscience and common sense.

I was not, however, to reach it without further detention in barbarous
countries. After being at sea four days I was seized by my mutinous crew,
set ashore upon an island, and having been made insensible by a blow upon
the head was basely abandoned.

MAROONED ON UG

When I regained my senses I found myself lying on the strand a short
remove from the margin of the sea. It was high noon and an insupportable
itching pervaded my entire frame, that being the effect of sunshine