Contractor to Puck: No, sir, this is not the foundation of the World's Fair buildings…

Wales draws a bustling Albany construction site where a stout, top-hatted political boss—rendered with the broad, smirking face typical of Gilded Age boss caricature—leans on a cane while a small figure (Puck himself, per the magazine's convention) holds up a sign reading "Plan of Assembly Prison Addition." Cranes hoist timber, workers lay brick, and the Capitol dome is visible on the horizon. The joke pivots on the boss's denial: the grandiose building activity isn't civic improvement but expansion of a legislative lockup—implying Albany's lawmakers deserve incarceration. Wales targets the corrupt New York statehouse machine, equating legislative pork with constructing the politicians' own future prison.