The itinerant Jewish peddler who hawked his wares about the country suffered grievously on this account. However indisputably Hebraic his name, his accent and his nose might be, those evidences of nationality were Anglicised, so to speak, by the fact that his legs were the legs of a sailor, and the bandy appendages so characteristic of his race sooner or later brought the gang down upon him in full cry and landed him in the fleet. In the year 1780 the fishing town of Cromer was thrown into a state of acute excitement by the behaviour of a casual stranger--a great, bearded man of foreign aspect who, taking a lodging in the place, resorted daily to the beach, where he walked the sands "at low water mark," now writing with great assiduity in a book, again gesticulating wildly to the sea and the cliffs, whence the suspicious townsfolk, then all unused to "visitors" and their eccentricities, watched his antics in wonder and consternation. The principal inhabitants of the place, alarmed by his vagaries, constituted themselves a committee of safety, and with the parson at their head went down to interview him; and when, in response to their none too polite inquiries, he flatly refused to give any account of himself, they by common consent voted him a spy and a public menace, telling each other that he was undoubtedly engaged in drawing plans of the coast in order to facilitate' the landing of some enemy; for did not the legend run:-- "He who would Old England win, Must at Weybourn Hope begin?" and was not the "Hoop," as it was called locally, only a few miles to the northward? No time was to be lost. Post-haste they dispatched a messenger to Lieut. Brace at Yarmouth, begging him, if he would save his country from imminent danger, to lose not a moment in sending his gang to seize the suspect and nip his fell design in the bud. With this alarming request Brace promptly complied, and the stranger was dragged away to Yarmouth. Arraigned before the mayor, he with difficulty succeeded in convincing that functionary that he was nothing more dangerous than a stray agriculturist whom the Empress Catherine had sent over from Russia to study the English method of growing-turnips! [Footnote: _State Papers_, Russia, cv.--Lieut. Brace, 18 Aug. 1780.] The unhandsome treatment meted out to the inoffensive Russian is of a piece with the whole aspect of pressing by instigation, of which it is at once a specimen and a phase. The incentive here was suspicion; but in the fertile field of instigation motives flourished in forms as varied as the weaknesses of human nature.