One of Clive's Heroes

In which the Court Leet of Market Drayton entertains Colonel Robert Clive; and our hero makes an acquaintance. One fine autumn evening, in the year 1754, a country cart jogged eastwards into Market Drayton at the heels of a thickset shaggy-fetlocked and broken-winded cob. The low tilt, worn and ill-fitting, swayed widely with the motion, scarcely avoiding the hats of the two men who sat side by side on the front seat, and who, to any one watching their approach, would have appeared as dark figures in a tottering archway, against a background of crimson sky.