There was no lack of subjects for our tongues to wag upon when the ale had loosed them, and a well-lined waist set the oil of gladness on our faces. There was, for one, the never failing theme of Lord Wellington's doings among the Dons. But a few days previous, General Marmont had raised the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo, and our spirits had been greatly stirred by the discovery of one of his dispatches, in which he boasted that he would have pursued the British forces to the lines of Lisbon "if the moment designed for the catastrophe of England had arrived." That put our English up, and was as good as a score of recruiting sergeants to our army. Catastrophe, we knew well, might come to us as it has done to other nations; but never, we vowed, should or could it come through a frog-eating Frenchman. We gladly turned from that topic to news nearer home. There was the great fight at Thissleton Gap, for instance, which showed what British grit and muscle and pluck could do; and we were all ready to wager all we had that if you searched France from north to south you could find no champion like Crib, who had near been the death of Molineux in a fight near Grantham, breaking his jaw, and leaving him senseless on the field. There had not been a bed to be had for love or money for twenty miles round Thissleton Gap the night before the fight, said the "Leeds Mercury," and all the nobility and gentry of the county had been there; and after his great victory Crib, carrying away a purse of £400, had driven to London in a carriage and four, the postillions decked with blue ribands and streamers, and the whole populace in every town and hamlet by the way turning out to cheer the wearer of the belt. Then, too, there was much talk of the progress making with the cutting of the new canal that was to tie the eastern and the western seas; and we had not yet done marvelling at the boring of the waterway under Stanedge. Then, again, we must gossip to one another anent that strange portent of the skies, the wondrous comet, that still made our early morns so beautiful and yet so fraught with dread. The wise men said its tail was over twenty million miles long, as it streamed away from Charles's Wain across the distant sky, and Mr. Mellor, the schoolmaster, did try to show me how the calculation had been made; whilst Mr. Varley, of the corn mill, who had a merry wit, did say that coals would soon be cheaper, for the Welsh were counting on the comet coming so near, they might toast their cheese by it. Mr. Mellor was somewhat ruffled that his serious discourse should be turned to levity, and said that as perchance Mr. Varley could not be expected to understand the deep subtleties of astronomy, he would try him on a subject nearer his heart.