His well-known aversion to altercation or controversy resulted in his being the only speaker. A loyal address was dictated by him extolling the blessings of government as then enjoyed and resting the blame of disaffection on the religious teaching of a certain lot of immigrants who had come to the Talbot Settlement in time to enjoy its prosperity, and then, not having the devotion bred by being first-comers, found it easy to pick flaws. The year ’37 brought to them a mysterious individual mounted on a cream-coloured horse which ambled him along the lanes and roads of Yarmouth. Like the clock peddler, the stranger wore deep green glasses in his spectacles. After his labours of disseminating dissension were over he managed to make his escape, but the cream-coloured nag figured as an officer’s charger on the Loyalist side--according to his late owner’s opinion, much after the manner of the unmounted Glengarries whose humour it was to steal at a moment’s rest--“convey, the wise it call”--but from the opposite point of view was _pressed_ into government service. It was an animal of no prejudices, for with its rider it was always in the van. Of those whose looks burned as they listened to the Colonel, and who would not subscribe to the address, some were yet to stand upon the drop to die for treason--a dignified name with which Colonel Talbot, in common with Drew, Prince and others, would have had little patience. These disaffected were chiefly influenced by an Englishman, George Lawton, who, like a good many of the demagogues of that day, had been a factious pate elsewhere. Concerned in the Bristol Riots, he was well up in the catch-words which thrilled the crowds there, and he used his strong mind and nimble tongue upon Canadian complications. He had to escape, somehow, from the consequences of his acts at home; so a sham illness and a sham death, a stuffed coffin and a funeral, and a voyage of the supposed deceased brought George Lawton to the Talbot District to sow those “seed-grains” of revolutionary doctrine which were to make him a second time an outcast. One of the first persons he met in this country was a chief mourner who had followed his coffin to the grave. As early as ’33, Colonel Talbot writes to a friend: “My rebels endeavoured to hold a meeting at St. Thomas on the 17th, Dr. Franklin’s birthday as I am informed, but in which they were frustrated by my Royal Guards, who routed the rascals at all points and drove them out of the village like sheep, numbers with broken heads leaving their hats behind them--the glorious work of old Colonel Hickory. In short, it was a most splendid victory. Mr. Fraser, the Wesleyan minister, behaved admirably on the occasion, and I scarcely think they will venture to call another meeting in St. Thomas. Their object was to form a political union, the articles of which were to elect the Legislative Council and magistrates.”