ner,
between the fair Harriet and her dashing suitor.

Besides his one great and distinguishing quality of assurance and vulgar
pretension, which it is difficult to describe, by any word short of
impudence, Mr. Joseph Hanson was by no means calculated to please
the eye of a damsel of seventeen, an age at which a man who owned to
five-and-thirty, and who looked and most probably was at least ten years
farther advanced on the journey of life, would not fail to be set down
as a confirmed old bachelor. He had, too, a large mouth, full of large
irregular teeth, a head of hair which bore a great resemblance to a wig,
and a suspicion of a squint, (for it did not quite amount to that odious
deformity,) which added a most sinister expression to his countenance.
Harriet Parsons could not abide him; and I verily believe she would have
disliked him just as much though a certain Frederick Mallet had never
been in existence.

How her father, a dissenter, a radical, and a steady tradesman of the
old school, who hated puffs and puffery, and finery and fashion, came to
be taken in by a man opposed to him in religion and politics, in action
and in speech, was a riddle that puzzled half the gossips in Belford. It
happened through a mutual enmity, often (to tell an unpalatable truth of
poor human nature) a stronger bond of union than a mutual affection.

Thus it fell out.

Amongst the reforms carried into effect by the town-council, whereof
John Parsons was a leading member, was the establishment of an efficient
new police to replace the incapable old watchmen, who had hitherto been
the sole guardians of life and property in our ancient borough. As far
as the principle went, the liberal party were united and triumphant,
They split, as liberals are apt to split, upon the rock of detail. It
so happened that a turnpike, belonging to one of the roads leading into
Belford, had been removed, by order of the commissioners, half a mile
farther from the town;--half a mile indeed beyond the town boundary;
and although there were only three houses, one a beer-shop, and the two
others small tenements inhabited by labouring people, between the site
of the old turnpike at the end of Prince's Street, and that of the new,
at the King's Head Pond, our friend the tinman, who was nothing if not
crotchetty, insisted with so much pertinacity upon the perambulation of
the blue-coated officials appointed for that beat, being extended along
the highway for th