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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 the 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.