ly held, to deliberate on the
best means of shutting themselves in; and at the meeting almost all the
adult male inhabitants attended, with the exception of the gentlemen in
the commission of the peace, and the town officials, who, though quite
prepared to wink hard at our irregularities, failed to see that, on any
grounds tenable in the eye of the law, they themselves could take a
share in them.

Our meeting at first threatened to be stormy. The extra Liberals, who,
in the previous ecclesiastical struggle, had taken part to a man with
the Gaelic people, as they did, in the subsequent church controversy,
with the Court of Session, began by an attack on the Town Justices. We
might all see now, said a Liberal writer lad who addressed us, how
little these people were our friends. Now when the place was threatened
by the pestilence, they would do nothing for us; they would not even so
much as countenance our meeting; we saw there was not one of them
present: in short, they cared nothing at all about us, or whether we
died or lived. But he and his friends would stand by us to the last;
nay, while the magistrates were evidently afraid, with all their wealth,
to move in the matter, terrified, no doubt, by the prosecutions for
damages which might be instituted against them were they to stop the
highways, and turn back travellers, he himself, though far from rich,
would be our security against all legal processes whatever. This, of
course, was very noble; all the more noble from the circumstance that
the speaker could not, as the _Gazette_ informed us, meet his own actual
liabilities at the time, and was yet fully prepared, notwithstanding, to
meet all our possible ones. Up started, however, almost ere he had done
speaking, a friend of the Justices, and made so angry a speech in their
defence, that the meeting threatened to fall into two parties, and
explode in a squabble. I rose in the extremity, and, though unhappily no
orator, addressed my townsfolk in a few homely sentences. Cholera, I
reminded them, was too evidently of neither party; and the magistrates
were, I was sure, nearly as much frightened as we were. But they really
could do nothing for us. In matters of life and death, however, when
laws and magistrates failed to protect quiet people, the people were
justified in asserting the natural right to protect themselves; and,
whatever laws and lawyers might urge to the contrary, that right was now
ours. In a neighbouring