their stand on a green a little above the
harbour; and, of course, where the gingerbread was, there the children
were gathered together; and the magistrates, astonished, visited the
spot in order to ascertain, if possible, the philosophy of the change.
They found the ground occupied by a talkative pedlar, who stood up
strongly for the young Liberals and the new side. The magistrates
straightway demanded the production of his license. The pedlar had none.
And so he was apprehended, and summarily tried, on a charge of
contravening the statute 55 Geo. III. cap. 71; and, being found guilty
of hawking without a license, he was committed to prison. The pedlar,
backed, it was understood, by the young Liberals, raised an action for
wrongous imprisonment; and, on the ground that the day on which he had
sold his goods was a fair or market-day, on which anybody might sell
anything, the magistrates were cast in damages. I liked the law-suits
very ill, and held that the young Liberals would have been more wisely
employed in making money by their shops and professions--secure that the
coveted honours would ultimately get into the wake of the good
bank-accounts--than that they should be engaged either in scattering
their own means in courts of law, or in impinging on the means of their
neighbours. And ultimately I found my proper political position as a
supporter in all ecclesiastical and municipal matters of my Conservative
townsmen, and a supporter in almost all the national ones of the Whigs;
whom, however, I always liked better, and deemed more virtuous, when
they were out of office than when they were in.

On one occasion I even became political enough to stand for a
councillorship. My friends, chiefly through the death of elderly voters
and the rise of younger men, few of whom were Conservative, felt
themselves getting weak in the place; and fearing that they could not
otherwise secure a majority at the Council board, they urged me to stand
for one of the vacancies, which I accordingly did, and carried my
election by a swimming majority. And in duly attending the first meeting
of Council, I heard an eloquent speech from a gentleman in the
opposition, directed against the individuals who, as he finely expressed
it, "were wielding the destinies of his native town;" and saw, as the
only serious piece of business before the meeting, the Councillors
clubbing pennies a-piece, in order to defray, in the utter lack of town
funds, the ex