een's Square to-day."

"Turn in to breakfast, Mr. Paget," Melville said. "My wife has a
headache, and is not come down yet. But Harry and I will do the
honours."

"Thank you kindly, no. I must ride into Wells. Why," he said, pulling
the sleeve of Melville's dressing-gown, "you look like an Eastern Rajah!
Your brother's blue jacket shows it off grandly. Upon my word, we are
all very plain folks when compared with the master of Fair Acres."

Then, slipping a shilling into old Thomas's hand, Mr. Paget mounted his
horse and rode away.

"A regular old country bumpkin!" Melville exclaimed. "He looks as if he
had come out of the Ark, and taken the pattern of Noah's coat!"

"He is a splendid old fellow," Harry said. "I wish we had more county
gentlemen like him. But I am rather sorry I did not offer to go on the
box of the carriage. I hope Joyce won't get into any crowd, or come in
for stone throwing and uproar."

"Oh, bother it! She will be all right. No one would want to steal her
children; there is enough of that article in the world and to spare,
without taking other people's."

Harry was nevertheless uneasy.

The unsettled condition of the whole district was becoming daily more
serious. The popular cry in Bristol only the year before had been for
Sir Charles Wetherall, and no Popery!

The people who went out to meet him when he came to open the assize, had
cheered and applauded him, trying to take the horses out of the carriage
and drag him into the city in triumph. But now a change had come over
the mind of the people, and the Reform Bill was exciting them to frenzy
and hatred of every man who opposed it, of whom their once idolized
Recorder was one of the most prominent.

As we look back over the half century which lies between our own days
and those of the great riots in the ancient city of Bristol, it is
strange to mark how the questions, then so furiously contested, are now
settled; how the pendulum, then swinging so violently, has subsided into
a more regular beat; how even the second Reform Bill, carried by a large
majority, is now a thing of the past; how the exclusion of any one from
holding office, parliamentary or social, on the ground of religion, is
now considered an act of tyrannical, and ill-judged interference,
between the conscience of a man, and his duty to God.

These fifty years, full of the great events so strongly marked by the
discoveries of science, are full also of lessons, which we do