have made out the gist of them; and I understand them
to recommend a gentle aperient in cases which at first baffle
diagnosis."

"Ah!" was the Mayor's only comment.

"I don't profess mine to be more than a free rendering," went on the
little apothecary. "The Latin, as you would suppose, puts it more
poetically."

"Talking of texts," said the patient, leaning back wearily on his
pillow, "there was a woman somewhere in the Bible who put her head
out of window and recommended for every man a damsel or two and a
specified amount of needlework. I ain't complainin', mind you; but
there's reason in all things."

You have heard how our movement was launched. Where it would have
ended none can tell, had not the Millennium interfered.

CHAPTER III.

THE MILLENNIUM.

Aristotle has laid it down that the highest drama concerns itself
with reversal of fortune befalling a man highly renowned and
prosperous, of better character rather than worse; and brought about
less by vice than by some great error or frailty. After all that has
been said, you will wonder how I can admit a frailty in Major Hymen.
But he had one.

You will wonder yet more when you hear it defined. To tell the
truth, he--our foremost citizen--yet missed being a perfect Trojan.
We were far indeed from suspecting it; he was our fine flower, our
representative man. Yet in the light of later events I can see now,
and plainly enough, where he fell short.

A University Extension Lecturer who descended upon us the other day
and, encouraged by the crowds that flocked to hear him discourse on
English Miracle Plays, advertised a second series of lectures, this
time on English Moralities, but only to find his audience diminished
to one young lady (whom he promptly married)--this lecturer, I say,
whose text-books indeed indicated several points of difference
between the Miracle Play and the Morality, but nothing to account for
so marked a subsidence in the register, departed in a huff, using
tart language and likening us to a pack of children blowing bubbles.

There is something in the fellow's simile. When an idea gets hold of
us in Troy, we puff at it, we blow it out and distend it to a globe,
pausing and calling on one another to mark the prismatic tints, the
fugitive images, symbols, meanings of the wide world glassed upon our
pretty toy. We launch it. We follow it with our eyes as it floats
from us--an irrecoverable delight. We watch until the m