ped that, in time, things will grow
better, and the revenues come round again to idemnify the town for its
present tribulation.

CHAPTER XLV--THE STRAMASH IN THE COUNCIL

As I have said, my third provostry was undertaken in a spirit of
sincerity, different in some degree from that of the two former; but
strange and singular as it may seem, I really think I got less credit for
the purity of my intents, than I did even in the first. During the whole
term from the election in the year 1813 to the Michaelmas following, I
verily believe that no one proposal which I made to the council was
construed in a right sense; this was partly owing to the repute I had
acquired for canny management, but chiefly to the perverse views and
misconceptions of that Yankee thorn-in-the-side, Mr Hickery, who never
desisted from setting himself against every thing that sprang from me,
and as often found some show of plausibility to maintain his
argumentations. And yet, for all that, he was a man held in no esteem or
respect in the town; for he had wearied every body out by his everlasting
contradictions. Mr Plan was likewise a source of great tribulation to
me; for he was ever and anon coming forward with some new device, either
for ornament or profit, as he said, to the burgh; and no small portion of
my time, that might have been more advantageously employed, was wasted in
the thriftless consideration of his schemes: all which, with my advanced
years, begat in me a sort of distaste to the bickerings of the council
chamber; so I conferred and communed with myself, anent the possibility
of ruling the town without having recourse to so unwieldy a vehicle as
the wheels within wheels of the factions which the Yankee reformator, and
that projectile Mr Plan, as he was called by Mr Peevie, had inserted
among us.

I will no equivocate that there was, in this notion, an appearance of
taking more on me than the laws allowed; but then my motives were so
clean to my conscience, and I was so sure of satisfying the people by the
methods I intended to pursue, that there could be no moral fault in the
trifle of illegality which, may be, I might have been led on to commit.
However, I was fortunately spared from the experiment, by a sudden change
in the council.--One day Mr Hickery and Mr Plan, who had been for years
colleaguing together for their own ends, happened to differ in opinion,
and the one suspecting that this difference was the fruit of so