nwall--dignitaries whose pleasant fame is now night, recalled only
by some neat byword or proverb current in the Delectable (or as a
public speaker pronounced it the other day, the Dialectable) Duchy.
Thus you may hear of "the Mayor of Falmouth, who thanked God when the
town jail was enlarged"; "the Mayor of Market Jew, sitting in his own
light"; "the Mayor of Tregoney, who could read print upside-down, but
wasn't above being spoken to"; "the Mayor of Calenick, who walked
two miles to ride one"; "the Mayor of East Looe, who called the King
of England 'Brother.'" Everyone remembers the stately prose in which
Gibbon records when and how he determined on his great masterpiece,
when and how he completed it. "It was at Rome: on the 15th of
October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while
the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter,
that the idea of writing the Decline and Fall of the City first
started in my mind." So I could tell with circumstance when, where
and how I first proposed my treatise; and shall, perhaps, when I have
concluded it. But life is short; and for the while my readers may be
amused with an instalment.

Now of all the Mayors of Cornwall the one who most engaged my
speculation, yet for a long while baffled all research, was "the
Mayor of Troy, so popular that the town made him Ex-Mayor the year
following."

Of course, if you don't know Troy, you will miss half the reason of
my eagerness. Simple, egregious, adorable town! Shall I go on here
to sing its praises? No; not yet.

The reason why I could learn nothing concerning him is that, soon
after 1832, when the Reform Bill did away with Troy's Mayor and
Corporation, as well as with its two Members of Parliament, someone
made a bonfire of all the Borough records. O Alexandria! And the
man said at the time that he did it for fun!

This brings me to yet another Mayor--the Mayor of Lestiddle, who is a
jolly good fellow.

Nothing could be handsomer than my calling the Mayor of Lestiddle a
jolly good fellow; for in fact we live at daggers drawn. You must
know that Troy, a town of small population (two thousand or so) but
of great character and importance, stands at the mouth of a river
where it widens into a harbour singularly beautiful and frequented by
ships of all nations; and that seven miles up this river, by a bridge
where the salt tides cease, stands Lestiddle, a town of fewer
inhabitants and