Ninety years after the year of the meal mob, and when every one who had either shared in it or remembered it were sleeping in their graves, I was amusing myself, one wet day, in turning over some old papers stored up in the drawers of a moth-eaten scrutoire, which had once belonged to Donald Sandison, when a small parcel of manuscripts, wrapped up with a piece of tape, which had once been red, attracted my notice. The first manuscript I drew out bore date 1742, and was entitled, “Representation, Condescendence, and Interlocutors, in the process of Matthew Simpson against the Cromarty men.” It contained a grievous complaint made by the town’s-folk to the Right Hon. Lord Balmerino. “Simpson was a person of a rancorous and very litigious spirit,” urged the paper; “and it was surely not a little unreasonable in him to expect, as he did in the suit, that the people of a whole country-side, indubitably innocent of every act of violence alleged against them, should be compelled to undertake a weary pilgrimage to Edinburgh to answer to his charges, when, from the circumstances of the case, anything they could have to depone anent the spulzie, would yield exactly the same result, whether deponed at Edinburgh, Cromarty, or Japan.” It went on to show that the people were miserably depressed by poverty; and that, if compelled to set out on such a journey, they would have to beg by the way; while their wives and children would be reduced to starvation at home, without even the resource of begging itself, seeing that all their neighbours were as wretchedly poor as themselves. Next in order in the parcel followed the statements of Mr. Matthew Simpson, addressed also to his Lordship. He had been robbed, he affirmed, by the men of the north three several times; twice by the people, and once by the lawyers; and having lost in this way a great deal of money, he could not well afford to lose more. It was stated, further, by the master, that Edinburgh could not be farther from Cromarty than Cromarty from Edinburgh; and that it was quite as reasonable, and fully as safe for the weaker party, that the conspirators should have to defend themselves in the metropolis, as that he, the prosecutor, should have to assail them in the village. Both manuscripts seemed redolent of that old school of Scotch law in which joke was so frequently called in to the assistance of argument, and dry technicalities relieved by dry humour. A third paper of the parcel bore date 1750, and was entitled, “Discharge from Matthew Simpson to Donald Sandison and others.” The fourth and last was a piece of barbarous rhyme, dignified, however, with the name of poetry, and which, after describing mealmongers as “damned rascals,” and “the worst of all men,” assured them, with a proper contempt for both the law of the land and the doctrine of purgatory, that there is an executive power vested in the people, which enables them to take summary justice