a dreary
business."

At this, the first hint of tedium, the company rose, drained their
glasses, and made for the door, leaving the sixty-six remaining
candidates to vote for themselves.

"Well," Mr. Rabling said to me, as we stood in the street; "so far,
this here Parish Meeting might be like any other Parish Meeting in
the Kingdom!"

I doubted, but did not contradict him.

"There's one thing," he added; "Ironmonger Loveday has laid in a
whole stock of sixpenny fire-balloons for to-night: and there isn't a
breath of wind. His boy's very clever with the scissors and paste:
and he've a-stuck a tissue-paper text on each--'Success to the
Charter of our Liberties,' and 'Rule Britannia' and 'God Speed the
Plough'; and nothing more than the sixpence charged."

Simple, egregious, delectable town! As I leaned out last night,
watching the young moon and smoking the last pipe before bed-time, a
dozen of these gay balloons rose from the waterside and drifted on
the faint north wind, seaward, past my window. Another dozen
followed, and another, until from one point and another of the dark
shore a hundred balloons soared over the water, challenging the
stars.

II.--THE SIMPLE SHEPHERD.

Troy Town,
29 January, 1895.

"And then, as he set the bowl of goat's milk on the board, that
simple Tyrolean turned to me with a magnificent sweep of the hand,
and exclaimed--"

Ah, my dear Prince, if you could only tell me what he exclaimed, you
would restore a whole parish to its natural slumbers. For indeed he
is playing the deuce with our nights, here in Troy, that guileless
Tyrolean.

How trivial are the immediate causes of great events! On New Year's
Day our excellent Vicar, having bought himself a Whitaker's Almanack
for 1895, presented his last year's copy to the Working Men's Reading
Room. In itself you would have thought this action of the Vicar's
signified no more than a generous desire to keep his parishioners
abreast of the times. In effect it inaugurated the Great Temperance
Movement in Troy--a social revolution of which we are only now, after
four long weeks, beginning to see the end.

You must not, of course, suppose that we had never heard of
temperance before. No, Prince, we do not live so far from Abyssinia
as all _that_. In a general way we understood it to be a good thing,
and upon that ground (op