the people were deemed ripe for action, the mask was thrown off, treasonable schemes and projects were openly proclaimed by the leaders of the coming movement, and echoed, from a hundred hills, by vast multitudes of their deluded followers. Large meetings were daily held on the neighbouring moors, where bodies of men were openly trained and armed for active and offensive operations. At length the insurrection, for such in truth it was, broke forth. Then living torrents of excited and exasperated men poured down those hillsides; the peaceful and well-affected were compelled to join the insurgent ranks, busy in the work of destruction and intimidation; when each evening brought the work of havoc to a temporary close, they laid them down to rest where the darkness overtook them. The roads were thus continually blockaded, and those who, under cover of the night, sought to obtain aid and assistance from less disturbed districts, were often interrupted and turned back by bodies of these men. Authority was at an end, and a large extensive district was completely at the mercy of reckless multitudes, burning to avenge the sufferings of the past, and bent on preventing, as they thought, a recurrence of them in future. The very towns were in their hands; "in an evil hour" a vast body of insurgents was "admitted" into one of the largest mercantile towns of the kingdom, where they pillaged and laid waste in every direction. In another town of the district a fearful riot was put down by force, some of the leaders of the mob being shot dead while heading a charge upon the military. The ascendancy of the law was at length asserted; many arrests took place; the jails were crowded with prisoners; and the multitudes without, deserted by those to whom they had looked up for advice, their friends in prison, with the unknown terrors of the law suspended over them, probably then felt that, miserable and lost as they had been before, they had now fallen even lower in the scale of human misery. Criminal proceedings were quickly instituted. Several commissions were sent down to the districts in which these disturbances had take place, in order that the offenders might meet with _speedy_ punishment. The law officers of the crown, with many and able assistants, in person conducted the proceedings. Temperate, mild, dignified, and forbearing was their demeanour; in no case was the individual the object of prosecution; it was the _crime_, through the person of the criminal, against which the government proceeded. No feelings of a personal nature were there exhibited; and a mild, but firm, as it were, a parental correction of erring and misguided children, seemed to be the sole object of those who then represented the government. Conviction was heaped upon conviction--sentence followed sentence--the miserable tool was distinguished from the man who made him what he was--the active emissary, the secret conspirator, also received each their proportionate amount of punishment.