Behind the horse limped a lean, dyspeptic-colored individual in a
Palm Beach suit that would have been a social death-warrant on the
shining sands of its name-place. There is no form of sartorialism
that takes on such utter humility as a Palm Beach suit gone wrong.
This particular vestment was spotted with ink, with mud, with
fruit-juices, with every kind of stain; it was punctured with
perforations that might have been due to fallen tobacco tinder.
The individual within this travesty of clothing was painfully
propelling a wheelbarrow, in which rode (not without complaint) a
substantial woman and a baby. An older child trailed from the Palm
Beach coat-tail.

These jovial vagabonds, as the reader will have suspected, were no
other than Theodolinda Chuff, Virgil Quimbleton, and the family of
Bleaks.

Affairs had gone steadily from bad to worse. After the incident--
or, as some blasphemously called it, the miracle--at Cana, Bishop
Chuff had commenced ruthless warfare. Enraged beyond control by
the perfidy of his daughter, he had sent out the armies of the
Pan-Antis to wreak vengeance on every human enterprise that could
be suspected of complicity in the matter of fermentation. Not only
had the countryside been laid waste, but the printing press had
been abolished and all publishing trades were now a thing of the
past. This, of course, had thrown Dunraven Bleak out of a job. He
had retrieved his wife and children from the seashore, and in
company with Quimbleton and Miss Chuff, and the noble and faithful
horse John Barleycorn, they had led a nomad existence for weeks,
flying from bands of pursuing chuffs, and bravely preaching their
illicit gospel of good cheer in the face of terrible dangers.