The story got abroad, and created great laughter throughout the whole country, and, as might be expected, the little Mayor of C., was ere long caricatured, pamphleted, and paragraphed into resigning, and it was only then that he was allowed to live in peace, and to forget his fatal visit to Valengay.

It was an enormous balloon filled with helium, that elemental gas forged from hydrogen in the nuclear furnace of the stars.

wavy seas

[…] the ever-changing panorama of the seasons, with the green spring, yellow summer, and the purple autumn, always rejoicing in the vales; and the white winter always, if not only, frosting the loftiest summits above them, cooling the down-flowing waters, and the upblowing winds, and imaging to the pure below the still greater purity of the regions to which they point: […]