Day and night the whole island was employed in preparing for the great
fleet and in huzzaing Popanilla. When at borne, every ten minutes he
was obliged to appear in the balcony, and then, with hand on heart and
hat in hand, ah! that bow! that perpetual motion of popularity! If a
man love ease, let him be most unpopular. The Managers did the
impossible to assist and advance the intercourse between the two
nations. They behaved in a liberal and enlightened manner, and a
deputation of liberal and enlightened merchants consequently waited upon
them with a vote of thanks. They issued so many pink shells that the
price of the public funds was doubled, and affairs arranged so skilfully
that money was universally declared to be worth nothing, so that every
one in the island, from the Premier down to the Mendicant whom the
lecture-loving Skindeep threatened with the bastinado, was enabled to
participate, in some degree, in the approaching venture, if we should
use so dubious a term in speaking of profits so certain.

Compared with the Fantaisian connection, the whole commerce of the world
appeared to the Vraibleusians a retail business. All other customers
were neglected or discarded, and each individual seemed to concentrate
his resources to supply the wants of a country where they dance by
moonlight, live on fruit, and sleep on flowers. At length the first
fleet of five hundred sail, laden with wonderful specimens of
Vraibleusian mechanism, and innumerable bales of Vraibleusian
manufactures; articles raw and refined, goods dry and damp, wholesale
and retail; silks and woollen cloths; cottons, cutlery, and camlets;
flannels and ladies' albums; under waistcoats, kid gloves, engravings,
coats, cloaks, and ottomans; lamps and looking-glasses; sofas, round
tables, equipages, and scent-bottles; fans and tissue-flowers;
porcelain, poetry, novels, newspapers, and cookery books; bear's-grease,
blue pills, and bijouterie; arms, beards, poodles, pages, mustachios,