They passed, and went on; and all that were with me in the council stood at the windows and listened.In the course of a minute or two after, two lassies, with a callan, that had been out, came flying and wailing, giving the alarm to the town.Then we heard the driving of the bludgeons on the doors, and the outcries of terrified women; and presently after we saw the poor chased sailors running in their shirts, with their clothes in their hands, as if they had been felons and blackguards caught in guilt, and flying from the hands of justice.
The town was awakened with the din as with the cry of fire; and lights came starting forward, as it were, to the windows.The women were out with lamentations and vows of vengeance.I was in a state of horror unspeakable.Then came some three or four of the pressgang with a struggling sailor in their clutches, with nothing but his trousers on--his shirt riven from his back in the fury.
Syne came the rest of the gang and their officers, scattered as it were with a tempest of mud and stones, pursued and battered by a troop of desperate women and weans, whose fathers and brothers were in jeopardy.And these were followed by the wailing wife of the pressed man, with her five bairns, clamouring in their agony to heaven against the king and government for the outrage.I couldna listen to the fearful justice of their outcry, but sat down in a corner of the council-chamber with my fingers in my ears.
In a little while a shout of triumph rose from the mob, and we heard them returning, and I felt, as it were, relieved; but the sound of their voices became hoarse and terrible as they drew near, and, in a moment, I heard the jingle of twenty broken windows rattle in the street.My heart misgave me; and, indeed, it was my own windows.
They left not one pane unbroken; and nothing kept them from demolishing the house to the ground-stone but the exhortations of Major Pipe, who, on hearing the uproar, was up and out, and did all in his power to arrest the fury of the tumult.It seems, the mob had taken it into their heads that I had signed what they called the press-warrants; and on driving the gang out of the town, and rescuing the man, they came to revenge themselves on me and mine;which is the cause that made me say it was a miraculous instinct that led Mrs Pawkie to take the family to Mr Pittle's; for, had they been in the house, it is not to be told what the consequences might have been.
Before morning the riot was ended, but the damage to my house was very great; and I was intending, as the public had done the deed, that the town should have paid for it."But," said Mr Keelivine, the town-clerk, "I think you may do better; and this calamity, if properly handled to the Government, may make your fortune," Ireflected on the hint; and accordingly, the next day, I went over to the regulating captain of the pressgang, and represented to him the great damage and detriment which I had suffered, requesting him to represent to government that it was all owing to the part I had taken in his behalf.To this, for a time, he made some scruple of objection; but at last he drew up, in my presence, a letter to the lords of the admiralty, telling what he had done, and how he and his men had been ill-used, and that the house of the chief-magistrate of the town had been in a manner destroyed by the rioters.
By the same post I wrote off myself to the lord advocate, and likewise to the secretary of state, in London; commanding, very properly, the prudent and circumspect manner in which the officer had come to apprize me of his duty, and giving as faithful an account as I well could of the riot; concluding with a simple notification of what had been done to my house, and the outcry that might be raised in the town were any part of the town's funds to be used in the repairs.
Both the lord advocate and Mr Secretary of State wrote me back by retour of post, thanking me for my zeal in the public service; and Iwas informed that, as it might not be expedient to agitate in the town the payment of the damage which my house had received, the lords of the treasury would indemnify me for the same; and this was done in a manner which showed the blessings we enjoy under our most venerable constitution; for I was not only thereby enabled, by what I got, to repair the windows, but to build up a vacant steading; the same which I settled last year on my dochter, Marion, when she was married to Mr Geery, of the Gatherton Holme.
