The Radical agitation reached its climax in 1819, when our friend Jabez was a well-formed, well-favoured young man of twenty, high in the estimation of his master and mistress. Popular rights had found a fresh champion in Henry Hunt, the son of a well-descended Wiltshire yeoman, a man of gentlemanlike bearing and attire, agreeable features mobile in expression, and dull grey eyes which lit like fiery stars when in the fervour of his speech his soul shone out of them. “Orator Hunt,” as he was ironically dubbed by those who loved him not, was the very man to move the people as he himself was moved; his energy and fervid eloquence carried his hearers with him, and as he was wont to lash himself to a fury which streaked his pale eyes with blood, and forced them forward in their sockets, no wonder the Manchester magnates were afraid of his influence on the multitude, or that the Prince Regent should issue a proclamation against seditious meetings and writings, or the military drilling of the populace, then carried on with so fervid an orator to inflame them. When Henry Hunt made a public entry into Manchester, and attended the theatre the same evening, a disturbance ensued, and he was expelled, and the next evening the theatre was closed, to preserve peace. Then a Watch-and-Ward, composed of the chief inhabitants, was established; a meeting called by the Radicals was prohibited; but that did not deter the calling of another on St. Peter’s Field, on the 16th of August, when a couple of large wagons were boarded over to serve as temporary hustings, whence Orator Hunt from the midst of his friends might address the assembled multitude. Augusta Ashton had just passed her fifteenth birthday. She was slim, graceful, and tall beyond her age, and was surpassing lovely. She was still under Mrs. Broadbent’s care, and went to school that morning as usual, other meetings having passed off quietly, and no apprehension of disorder being entertained until long after nine o’clock. About that hour the people began to assemble from all quarters on the open ground near St. Peter’s Church—not bloodthirsty roughs, but men, women, and children, drawn thither for a sight of a holiday spectacle. True, of the collective eighty thousand, though there were many thousands of earnest, thinking men who went to grapple with important questions, yet no such mighty gathering could be without its leaven of savagery and mischief. But those who went from the mills and the workshops, the hills and the valleys around Manchester, walking in procession, with bugles playing and gay banners flying, though they might look haggard, pinched and careworn, made no attempt to look deplorable, or excite compassion. They wore their Sunday suits and clean neckties; and by the side of fustian and corduroy walked the coloured prints and stuffs of wives and sweethearts, who went as for a gala-day, to break the dull monotony of their lives, and to serve as a guarantee of peaceable intention.