room;" "Popanilla rang the bell, and the waiters swept away the dead
bodies, and brought him a roasted _potato_ for supper." He next enjoys
the pleasures of the chase, and in revenge for a sharp fire, "burns
two villages, slays 2 or 300 head of women, and bags children without
number;" and in the evening Popanilla's powers of digestion are
improved. He now returns to Vraibleusia, where all are _panic_-struck,
and his friend, the banker, unlike his "perpetual ticket," has stopped
payment, and all our traveller's resources. Popanilla consoles him with
the joke that "things were not quite so bad as they appeared," till they
get worse, by two gentlemen in blue, with red waistcoats, arresting the
ambassador for high treason. This completes his "amusements." He fears
"confined cells, overwhelming fetters, black bread, and green water, in
the principal gaol in Hubbabub;" but becomes ensconced in Leigh Hunt's
"elegantly furnished apartment, with French sash-windows and a piano.
Its lofty walls were entirely hung with a fanciful paper, representing a
Tuscan vineyard; the ceiling was covered with sky and clouds; roses were
in abundance; and the windows, though well secured, excited no jarring
associations in the mind of the individual they illumined, protected as
they were by polished bars of cut-steel."

"Next to being a plenipotentiary, Popanilla preferred being a prisoner.
His daily meals consisted of every delicacy in season; a marble bath was
ever at his service; a billiard-room and dumb-bells always ready; and
his old friends, the most eminent physician, and the most celebrated
practitioner in Hubbabub, called upon him daily to feel his pulse and
look at his tongue. These attentions authorized a hope that he might yet
again be an ambassador; that his native land might still be discovered,
and its resources still be developed; but when his gaoler told him that
the rest of the prisoners were treated in a manner equally indulgent,
because the Vraibleusians are the most humane people in the world,