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 (optimists that we are) believed its ultimate success to be but a question of time. But I think I may say we never regarded it as a pressing question--such as the reform of the House of Lords, for instance. The general impression (I call it no more) was that we should all be temperate sooner or later; possibly as the next step after espousing our Deceased Wife's Sister. Well, our Vicar laid his copy of the 1894 almanack on the reading-room table at 11.30 a.m., or thereabouts, looked over the local papers for a few minutes, and left the building at ten minutes to noon. I get this information from Matthias James, our respected pilot, who happened to be in the room, reading the _Shipping Gazette_. It is confirmed by Mr. Hansombody and four or five other members. At noon precisely, Mr. Rabling (our gasman and an earnest Methodist) came in. His eye, as it wandered round in search of an unoccupied newspaper, was arrested by the scarlet and green binding of Whitaker. He picked the book up, opened it casually, and read: The proof gallons of spirits distilled during the year ending March 31st, 1893, were 10,691,576 in England, 20,107,077 in Scotland, and 13,615,668 in Ireland. . . .