There was champagne bubbling at a score of sideboards where noiseless waiters poured it into goblets as broad and flat as floating water-lily leaves.

And through it all moved the shepherds and shepherdesses of that beautiful Arcadia--the shepherds in their Tuxedo jackets, with vast white shirt-fronts broad as the map of Africa, with spotless white waistcoats girdling their equators, wearing heavy gold watch-chains and little patent shoes blacker than sin itself--and the shepherdesses in foaming billows of silks of every colour of the kaleidoscope, their hair bound with glittering headbands or coiled with white feathers, the very symbol of municipal purity.

One would search in vain the pages of pastoral literature to find the equal of it.
And as they talked, the good news spread from group to group that it was already known that the new franchise of the Citizens' Light was to be made for two centuries so as to give the company a fair chance to see what it could do.

At the word of it, the grave faces of manly bondholders flushed with pride, and the soft eyes of listening shareholders laughed back in joy.

For they had no doubt or fear, now that clean government had come.