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I've never done cryptograms, but Google located an online cryptogram solver that solved this one right away. Will say no more to avoid spoiling the fun.

I found the online solver in seconds too so that will give the answer.

It looks fairly difficult to solve by hand at first glance because the 2nd most common letter in English doesn't turn up very often in it.

The double letters and the wordbreaks plus punctuation obviously make it easier to solve by hand though.

Last time I solved one of those was when I was a teenager when my brother didn't believe it was possible, took me a while (hours maybe), and the answer was

"Hey, hey, the clouds are away
There's straw for the donkeys
And the innocents can all sleep safely"

Two very common letters are the most frequent (4 each) word endings in the passage. In hindsight, word endings might have been a good starting point.

ParadigmShifter,

I can see, hear, smell, touch, taste.

Well my brother had "whey" instead of away for the end of the first line.

I learnt how to solve it from "The Whizzkids Handbook" which was one of the books in the school book club thing.

There's a good computerphile video about using a modern day laptop to crack the enigma code also which is worth a look.

It's all about statistics anyway obvs.

I'm sure you guys are already aware but, if not, you should check out Zipf's Law ....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE

VSauce has the only semi understandable video about the Banach-Tarski paradox too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s86-Z-CbaHA&t=9s

Oh and there's also Benford's Law which is used to spot fake statistics/accountancy fraud

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

Hi PS,

Definitely, Benford's Law, Simpson's Paradox - they're all explained in this wonderful article ...

https://www.theregister.com/2014/05/20/german_tank_problem_and_leaky_data/

Thanks for the links Brendan and PS, very interesting