I turned into a deserted by-way, wondering who this woman was and hoping to make progress more quickly towards the lower part of the town. Even here I met with the same assertion of victory. Three little bare-legged urchins were belaboring a fourth who was scarce able to toddle. He stood on a doorstep warding off the blows of his assailants with a stick. The cause of their attack was the blue blouse he wore;—blue was the color of the defeated party. “Hiky tiky, you Jacobite!” cried the three little soldiers of the Earl. “Come down and fight fair, you coward.” I caught up the nearest of the three boys and spanked him well for a bully; upon which the other two fled precipitately into the midst of a duck pond where they stood knee deep in the slimy water and dared me to follow them at my peril. “I’m as good an Earl’s man as them,” cried the defender of the doorstep. “But I’ll be a Jacobite now for spite. Don’t come near me, you rebel brats.” He shouldered his stick like a musket and strutted ahead, offering to accompany me to the next corner if I was afraid. I took the little fellow safely to his mother’s doorstep and then continued my way through King Street to the Slip, whence I could see the whole water front and the merchant ships lying at anchor. I had scarcely reached the battery by the Stadt Huys when a crowd of people came pell mell along the square. They were shouting and yelling at a score of persons who went before and were provided with brooms decked in the victorious white ribbons of the Earl’s party. They were sweeping the street industriously. As they drew near I saw that the ground in front of them was plentifully strewed with little blue marbles the size of birds’ eggs. The sweepers were thus in play cleansing the town of the blue taint of their enemies. They drew near the water, each vying with his neighbor to be the first to get the marbles in front of him into the bay. Ere long they were popping merrily upon the surface. At that moment a diversion occurred in the form of a charge by a company of marines from one of the merchant ships in the harbor. The marines came up the Slip on the run, and in two minutes a hot fight began. The brooms were not bad weapons of defense. The cutlasses of the sailors got entangled in the brushy ends and sometimes the weapons of the sailors were jerked clean out of their hands. Now and then a stinging thrust in the face would set a man yelling with pain and anger. Meantime the bystanders amused themselves by egging on the combatants as if it were a cock fight. This sort of thing could not last long. One by one the ends of the brooms were lopped off. The sweepers gave back and at last broke into flight just as the sheriff and a guard of six men came to their relief. Not at all daunted by the appearance of the officers of the law, the marines continued the attack, now gaining ground, now losing, but keeping to it with a will.