ent and discontent; and the purport of the meeting proposed was
to petition Parliament against the continuance of the American war and
the King against the continuance of his ministers.

Placards of an unusually inflammatory and imprudent nature had
given great alarm to the more sober and well-disposed persons in the
neighbourhood of W----; and so much fear was felt or assumed upon the
occasion that a new detachment of Lord Ulswater's regiment had been
especially ordered into the town; and it was generally rumoured that the
legal authorities would interfere, even by force, for the dispersion
of the meeting in question. These circumstances had given the measure a
degree of general and anxious interest which it would not otherwise
have excited; and while everybody talked of the danger of attending the
assembly, everybody resolved to thrust himself into it.

It was about the goodly hour of noon, and the persons assembled were
six in number, all members of the most violent party, and generally
considered by friend and foe as embracers of republican tenets. One of
these, a little, oily, corpulent personage, would have appeared far
too sleek and well fed for a disturber of things existing, had not a
freckled, pimpled, and fiery face, a knit brow, and a small black eye of
intolerable fierceness belied the steady and contented appearance of his
frame and girth. This gentleman, by name Christopher Culpepper, spoke in
a quick, muffled, shuffling sort of tone, like the pace of a Welsh pony,
somewhat lame, perfectly broken-winded, but an exemplary ambler for all
that.

Next to him sat, with hands clasped over his knees, a thin, small man,
with a countenance prematurely wrinkled and an air of great dejection.
Poor Castleton! his had been, indeed, the bitter lot of a man, honest
but weak, who attaches himself, heart and soul, to a public cause which,
in his life at least, is hopeless. Three other men were sitting by
the open window, disputing, with the most vehement gestures, upon
the character of Wilkes; and at the other window, alone, silent, and
absorbed, sat a man whose appearance and features were singularly
calculated to arrest and to concentrate attention. His raven hair,
grizzled with the first advance of age, still preserved its strong, wiry
curl and luxuriant thickness. His brows, large, bushy, and indicative of
great determination, met over eyes which at that moment were fixed
upon vacancy with a look of thought and calm