and worked outside Greece for most of their lives. Notable among these were and Alexandros Pallis. In 1887 Cleanthis Michailidis, then working abroad for the Ralli Brothers trading company, visited his native island of Lesbos after an absence of twenty years. The next year he read My Journey. The two experiences together inspired him to become a demotic writer under the pen-name Argyris Eftaliotis. The first of his Island Stories appeared in Estia in 1889, and the whole collection was published in 1894, establishing him as one of a new generation of demotic prose writers. But Eftaliotis was more than just a short story writer (and a poet, whose entries for the Filadelfeios prizes earned some praise). He became one of Psycharis' most fervent supporters and the two men carried on a voluminous correspondence, later edited and published. The third member of Psycharis' 'triumvirate' was Eftaliotis' close friend Alexandros Pallis. Like Eftaliotis, Pallis worked for the Ralli Brothers in Manchester, Liverpool and Bombay; his career in the company was long and successful, and he eventually became a partner and director. He used some of his considerable wealth to fund various demotic literary activities for the next few decades, including work by Palamas, Eftaliotis, Xenopoulos and Karkavitsas. Pallis also published his own work, starting in 1892 with the first part of his translation of the Iliad; this was more uncompromisingly demotic than Polylas' earlier Odyssey. A decade later he was also to achieve some notoriety when his demotic translation of the New Testament helped to spark the Gospel Riots in Athens. It is notable that Psycharis, Eftaliotis and Pallis while all born on Greek soil and unfailingly patriotic, all spent much of their working lives in French- and English-speaking surroundings where diglossia was unknown and it was taken for granted that people wrote and spoke in the same language. This may have contributed to their shared perception that Greek diglossia was an exception, a problem that they could solve by energetic literary intervention. Black '97: Change in national mood The good humour of the debate in the early years after the advent of My Journey was demonstrated in 1893 when the prestigious Parnassos Literary Society invited Psycharis to give a talk on the subject of demotic. The Society served as a kind of informal Academy, and on this occasion the audience included the king, the queen, and two princes. The talk