Quietness was again restored. A group had gathered around the fire, to amuse themselves with a little chat. Among which was an attorney’s clerk out of place, in the last stage of sottishness and vagrancy; a drunken mechanic; and a kind of decent itinerant, very pedagogue-like, an inveterate reader of the Twopenny Police Dispatch (the only paper the landlord took in), and a stout advocate of the Holy mother church and Daniel O’Connell, the father of the people, as he styled him. A few ungentlemanly words were exchanged between this small politician and a staunch supporter of the English Church; several topics were descanted upon, among which was the character of Wellington and his campaigns. A short but lively description was given of the Battle of Vittoria, by an old soldier in a labourer’s dress.

Wellington, it was said, was not the man he was, or else the papers did not speak the truth; and, certainly, a few glaring facts were produced that they could, at least at times, make a mistake. This brought on a discussion about the management of newspapers.

One talkative fellow maintained that one newspaper was but merely a copy of another; but this assertion was clearly set aside, and the duties of an Editor and Reporter nicely discriminated, by a very equivocal sort of a gemman, in a great coat, whom we strongly suspected was somewhat related to the Swell Mob.