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them; the Square was crowded, but everyone, including the police, was so astonished that for several minutes no one lifted a finger to stop the flood of treason pouring out. Just as the speaker had reached the words "an ampler aether, a diviner air" a posse of policemen dashed forward and arrested him. He was a child of five years old. The laugh was against the Government. Even below ground laughter went on, though it was strongly discouraged by authority. People were allowed five minutes a day in which to laugh and get it over, like the interval for coughing which, in earlier days, was sometimes conceded to bronchial subjects at a concert. To encourage them in this, the radio told stories intended to raise a laugh, but these were not, judged by a past standard, really funny. They were either purely nonsensical--attempts to detach the microbe of humor from its context in daily life, jokes in tablet form, like food--or they were scientific howlers, such as saying the earth is flat, though in fact they were much more recondite than this, since the audience possessed a good deal of scientific knowledge, indeed it was almost the only knowledge they did possess. Fortunately for the Government, the infant traitor was apprehended only two minutes before the interval for compulsory indulgence in mirth was due; so the Government had some pretext for pretending that the guffaws which greeted the arrest were really a response to the official witticisms which almost immediately began to pour out. However, the thousands who were present at the scene knew better, and, since humor dies hard, during the remainder of the day and for several days to come the police had to report outbreaks of hysterical and pointless giggling, which only ceased after the strongest measures had been taken. As for the child, he was another problem. The first idea was that he should be publicly beheaded, on the very spot where he had been caught red-handed--in fact, the day and hour of the execution were fixed. But the mass observers reported that there was a strong feeling against such a measure, not only among the articulate members of the population, but also among those who could only speak by signs. The Government, therefore, who paid some attention to whatever public opinion there was, proclaimed that by an act of extreme clemency the sentence would be commuted to one of imprisonment for life. Meanwhile, the child would be subjected to a searching interrogation. It was soon apparent that the child was not politically minded. He could not answer the simplest questions about the Constitution and in other ways was backward for his age. The Investigation Department decided, very reluctantly, that he must be someone else's mouthpiece. But whose? Every known form of truth-finding was applied (and by that time many more were known than we know now), from old-fashioned devices like making the child stand in the corner, or sending him supperless to bed, to ingenious tortures and truth-evacuating drugs. But to no purpose. All the child would say was "The pretty gentleman, he told me." Living so long below ground, and on exiguous though sustaining fare, had not improved the looks of the population; they were as a whole thin and scrawny, with bellies permanently distended by wind. But among them were quite a number to whom the epithet "pretty gentleman" could be applied; and these very naturally shook in their shoes. ( Indeed, it has been said by social historians that the prejudice against good looks which is to some extent the subject of my story dated from that day.) The suspects were rounded up and questioned; but the job was not as simple as that; many of them, seized by sudden modesty, maintained they were not pretty at all and would hate to be called so. "Prove it," they said, and, of course, it was very difficult to prove; they produced witnesses, aestheticians, art critics, and others, to swear they had no claims to good looks and were, in fact, particularly