r lies except upon due deliberation.

Mr. Rabling left the room and walked straight up to the Vicarage, and
the Vicar assured him that the Customs Returns were almost as
accurate as if they had been prepared under a Conservative
Government. You must excuse these details, Prince. They are really
essential to the story.

At 12.55 Mr. Rabling (after a hasty dinner) handed across the counter
of the post-office a telegram addressed to his religious
superintendent at Plymouth. The message ran:

"Here anual consumption of beer over three milion barls.
Greatly distresd, Rabling."

The telegraph clerk kindly corrected all the errors of spelling in
the above, save one, which escaped him. By "here" Mr. Rabling had
intended "hear" (_scilicet_ "I hear," or "we hear"). The answer
arrived from Plymouth within an hour.

"Am sending missionary next train."

Thus our Temperance movement began. The missionary arrived before
set of sun, borrowed a chair from Mr. Rabling, carried it down to the
town quay and mounted it. A number of children at once gathered
round, in the belief that the stranger intended a tumbling
performance. The missionary eyed them and began, "Ah, if I can once
get hold of you tender little ones--" an infelicitous opening, which
scattered them yelling, convinced that the Bogey-man had come for
them at last. Upon this he changed his tone and called "O Gomorrah!"
aloud several times in a rich baritone voice, which fetched quite a
little crowd of elders around him from the reading-room, the
fish-market, the "King of Prussia" Inn, and other purlieus of the
quay.

Then the missionary gave us a most eloquent and inspiriting address,
in the course of which he mentioned that if all the beer annually
consumed in England were placed in bottles, and the bottles piled on
one another, it would reach within five hundred miles of the moon.
He asked us if this were not an intolerable state of things and a
disgrace to our boasted civilisation? Of course, there could be no
two questions about it. We are not unreasonable, down in Troy.
We only want a truth to be brought home to us. The missionary said
that if only a man would deny himself his morning glass, in eight
months he could buy himself a harmonium, besides being better in mind
and body. And he wound up by inviting us to attend a meeting in the
Town Hall that evening.

Well, at the evening performance he made us all feel so uncomfortable
that, as