It was my great honour after the dinner, and whilst the company sat over their cups, to be invited to the head of the table by Mr. Joseph Scott, of Woodsome, who was then lately become a magistrate, a handsome man of some forty years. He asked most kindly after the health of my father and mother, and bade the tapster who waited on the upper end of the table charge me a bumper of the wine of Oporto, which did fill my heart with a great warmth. Then when I would have returned to my seat by the schoolmaster he bade me remain, and I listened with all my ears to the talk of my betters. I noticed that Mr. Scott spoke mostly with Mr. William Horsfall, of Marsden. I knew Mr. Horsfall well by sight, having seen him often on the road as he went to or returned from market, a man in his prime, with a keen, resolute look; not easily turned from his purpose, I warrant you. Impatient of opposition, I judged him even then, brusque, and a little petulant, but not unkindly of heart as I had heard, for those that worked for him had ever a good name for him--but a masterful man. The talk between these two was much of the coolness there then was between America and England. Mr. Horsfall was very bitter about this. "It is all the fault of those accursed Orders in Council," he said. "Before our benighted Government issued the Orders in Council, America took twelve million pounds worth of our manufactures--now not one penny-worth. Withdraw the Orders and you conciliate America; you bind her to us by the closest tie of all, the tie of self-interest. So long as these Orders remain in force it is futile to talk of negotiations. It is beating the air. We are alienating our own flesh and blood, we are running grave risk of having another enemy on our hands, and that of our own household, our cousins if not our brothers. Here are we pulling our own nose to spite Napoleon's face. It is suicidal, it is criminal!"--and I know not how many other hard names Mr. Horsfall hurled at the poor Government whilst Mr. Scott, with the ink scarce dry on his commission, fidgetted in his seat and was, I thought, hard put to it to defend the Government. At last when Mr. Horsfall grew more vehement in his denunciation of ministers, Mr. Scott bade him remember that it was the Whigs who in January, 1807, issued the first counterblast to Napoleon's Berlin Decree; and then did these two Englishmen, the one a Whig and the other a Tory, get so warm about Whiggery and Toryism that I had much to do to get to the truth of the matter. In a lull of the storm I did so far presume upon the great condescension that Mr. Scott had shewn to me, for my father's sake, as to ask him what these same Orders in Council might be, and how they bore upon us humble folk in Slaithwaite, for save that every one did speak of them as the cause of much of our bad trade and sore distress, I knew little for certain about them. "You must know then," explained Mr.