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. He found Quimbleton a stern ringleader. Virgil was not satisfied with the old-fashioned method of stumping the country from the taff-rail of a Pullman car, and insisted on strapping Bleak into the cockpit of a biplane and flying him from city to city. They would land in some central square, and the candidate, deafened and half-frozen, would stammer a few halting remarks. He felt it rather keenly that Quimbleton looked down on his lack of oratorical gift, and it was a frequent humiliation that when words did not prosper on his tongue his impatient pilot would turn on the motors and zoom off into space in the very middle of a sentence. Nevertheless, the campaign went famously. Bleak had one considerable advantage in being comparatively unknown. He had never permitted himself the luxury of making enemies: except for a few ex-reporters who had once worked on the Balloon he had not a foe in the world. Quimbleton had been eager to import a covey of gunmen from other cities, but when these arrived there was really nothing for them to do. They were glad to accept jobs from Bishop Chuff, and were well paid for waylaying and sniping the few grapes and apples that had escaped previous pogroms. There was only one plank in Bleak's modest platform, but he walked it so happily that it began to look like a gangplank leading onto the Ship of State. He expressed his doctrine very agreeably in his speech accepting the party nomination; though credit should be given to Theodolinda, who had assisted him by a little private seance before he addressed the convention.