And now I must wait each day until Finchsifter has taken his walk from right to left round my Lake, taking my walk (from left to right) in the chill of the evening to pacify the tutelary Goddess by smoothing back her green plush corsage, which has been rubbed the wrong way by Finchsifter. [Illustration] THE HUNDREDTH AMENDMENT After the passage of the Ninety-eighth Amendment making it a misdemeanor to “_manufacture, sell, own, possess, purchase, nurse, dandle or otherwise caress or display that effigy of the infant form commonly known as a Doll_” … the abolition of that feathered symbol of vicarious maternity, the Stork, followed as a matter of course. The passage of the Anti-Stork Bill or, to be more accurate, the Ninety-ninth Amendment, thanks to the tenacity and tact of President John Quincy Epstein, was the most expeditious piece of legislation put through by the hundred and fifth Congress. It must not be forgotten, however, that the introduction of lectures on obstetrics into the curriculum of the kindergartens had done much to educate the child vote and that at the time the fate of the Stork was hanging in the balance, that once esteemed Bird of Prurient Evasion was already becoming unpopular and well on its way to join the Dodo. And now the department of government devoted to the cause of Infant Uplift, having abolished the Mock-Offspring and settled the fate of the Bird of Nativity, cast about for some new Field of Endeavor. And what more fitting than that they should light upon that hoary old imposter masquerading under the several aliases Santa Claus, Saint Nicholas, Kris Kringle, and Father Christmas? At once the Propaganda was started. Press agents were engaged, lecture tours arranged, magazines subsidized. No matter what it might cost, this “Vulture gnawing at the Palladium of Infant Emancipation” must be destroyed!! Santa Claus, once, in the memory of living men and women, adored by children and winked at by their parents, was now branded as an imposter, a mountebank, a public nuisance, and a perverter of infant intelligence. Santa Claus was an outlaw from the Commonwealth of Reason. It was “thumbs down” for Santa! It may be well to explain right here (since none of the events chronicled in this History has yet happened) that the movement for the Emancipation and Self-Determination of Infants, which has now taken such great strides, had its initiation in the presidential term of Miles Standish Sovietski when Congress extended the franchise to every child over five years of age who had made any serious contribution to literature or higher mathematics. It was in the same year that President Sovietski signed the Sixty-fourth Amendment to the Federal Constitution, prohibiting the publication of fairy tales, and Congress suspended the Limitation-of-Search Act in order that private libraries and nurseries might be raided without warning and all copies of the forbidden works summarily seized and destroyed.