But upon that special day on which we are about to introduce our reader into the narrow confines of its common parlour, the said hostelry was crowded with persons of a very different description from the peaceable idlers who were ordinarily wont to empty mine host’s larder, and forget the price of corn over the divine inspirations of pomarial nectar. Instead of the indolent, satisfied air of the saturnalian merrymaker, the vagrant angler, or the gentleman farmer, with his comely dame who “walked in silk attire, and siller had to spare;” instead of the quiet yet glad countenances of such hunters of pleasure and eaters of eel-pie, or the more obstreperous joy of urchins let loose from school to taste some brief and perennial recreation, and mine host’s delicacies at the same time; instead of these, the little parlour presented a various and perturbed group, upon whose features neither eel-pie nor Herefordshire cider had wrought the relaxation of a holiday or the serenity of a momentary content. The day to which we now refer was the one immediately preceding that appointed for the far-famed meeting at W----; and many of the patriots, false or real, who journeyed from a distance to attend that rendezvous, had halted at our host’s of the Jolly Angler, both as being within a convenient space from the appointed spot, and as a tabernacle where promiscuous intrusion and (haply) immoderate charges were less likely to occur than at the bustling and somewhat extraordinary hotels and inns of the town of W----. The times in which this meeting was held were those of great popular excitement and discontent; and the purport of the meeting proposed was to petition Parliament against the continuance of the American war and the King against the continuance of his ministers. Placards of an unusually inflammatory and imprudent nature had given great alarm to the more sober and well-disposed persons in the neighbourhood of W----; and so much fear was felt or assumed upon the occasion that a new detachment of Lord Ulswater’s regiment had been especially ordered into the town; and it was generally rumoured that the legal authorities would interfere, even by force, for the dispersion of the meeting in question. These circumstances had given the measure a degree of general and anxious interest which it would not otherwise have excited; and while everybody talked of the danger of attending the assembly, everybody resolved to thrust himself into it.