e distance aforesaid, that the whole council were set
together by the ears, and the measure had very nearly gone by the board
in consequence. The imminence of the peril saved them. The danger of
reinstating the ancient Dogberrys of the watch, and still worse,
of giving a triumph to the tories, brought the reformers to their
senses--all except the man of tin, who, becoming only the more confirmed
in his own opinion as ally after ally fell off from him, persisted in
dividing the council six different times, and had the gratification of
finding himself on each of the three last divisions, in a minority of
one. He was about to bring forward the question upon a seventh occasion,
when a hint as to the propriety in such case of moving a vote of censure
against him for wasting the time of the board, caused him to secede from
the council in a fury, and to quarrel with the whole municipal body,
from the mayor downward.

Now the mayor, a respectable and intelligent attorney, heretofore John
Parsons' most intimate friend, happened to have been brought publicly
and privately into collision with Mr. Joseph Hanson, who, delighted to
find an occasion on which he might at once indulge his aversion to the
civic dignitary, and promote the interest of his love-suit, was not
content with denouncing the corporation _de vive voiae_, but wrote three
grandiloquent letters to the Belford Courant, in which he demonstrated
that the welfare of the borough, and the safety of the constitution,
depended upon the police parading regularly, by day and by night, along
the high road to the King's Head Pond, and that none but a pettifogging
chief magistrate, and an incapable town-council, corrupt tools of a
corrupt administration, could have had the gratuitous audacity to cause
the policeman to turn at the top of Prince's Street, thereby leaving
the persons and property of his majesty's liege subjects unprotected
and uncared for. He enlarged upon the fact of the tenements in question
being occupied by agricultural labourers, a class over whom, as he
observed, the demagogues now in power delighted to tyrannise; and
concluded his flourishing appeal to the conservatives of the borough,
the county, and the empire at large, by a threat of getting up a
petition against the council, and bringing the whole affair before the
two Houses of Parliament.

Although this precious epistle was signed Amicus Patriae, the writer
was far too proud of his production to entren