he were dreaming. The cigar on the opposite side of the little
table glowed rosily several times, and then Quimbleton's voice
resumed, in a deep undertone.

"It is necessary to tell you," he said, "that the Corporation was
founded a number of years ago, long before the events of the fatal
year 1919 and the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The
incident of this afternoon may have caused you to think that what
is vulgarly called booze is the chief preoccupation of our
society. That is not so. We were organized at first simply to
bring merriment and good cheer into the lives of those who have
found the vexations of modern life too trying. In our early days
we carried on an excellent (though unsystematic) guerilla warfare
against human suffering.

"In this (let me admit it frankly) we were to a great degree
selfish. As you are aware, the essence of humor is surprise: we
found a delicious humor in our campaign of surprising woebegone
humanity in moments of crisis. For instance, we used to picket the
railway terminals to console commuters who had just missed their
trains. We found it uproariously funny to approach a perspiring
suburbanite, who had missed the train (let us say) to Mandrake
Park, and to press upon him, with the compliments of the
Corporation, some consolatory souvenir--a box of cigars, perhaps,
or a basket of rare fruit. Housewives, groaning over their endless
routine of bathing the baby, ordering the meals, sweeping the
floors and so on, would be amazed by the sudden appearance of one
of our deputies, in the service uniform of gray and silver,
equipped with vacuum cleaner and electric baby-washing machine, to
take over the domestic chores for one day. The troubles of lovers