That Reef itself had undergone more changes than any other spot in the colony, as the Peak had undergone fewer.  The town by this time contained more than two hundred buildings, of one sort and another, and the population exceeded five hundred souls.  This was a small population for so many tenements; but the children, as yet, did not bear a just proportion to the adults.  The crater was the subject of what to Mark Woolston was a most painful law-suit.  From the first, he had claimed that spot as his private property; though he had conceded its use to the public, under a lease, since it was so well adapted, by natural formation, to be a place of refuge when invasions were apprehended.  But the crater he had found barren, and had rendered fertile; the crater had even seemed to him to be an especial gift of Providence bestowed on him in his misery; and the crater was his by possession, as well as by other rights, when he received strangers into his association.  None of the older inhabitants denied this claim.  It is the last comers who are ever the most anxious to dispute ancient rights.  As they can possess none of these established privileges themselves, they dislike that others should enjoy them; and association places no restraints on their cupidity.  Pennock, once in the hands of “the people,” was obliged to maintain their rights, or what some among them chose to call their rights; and he authorized the attorney-general to bring an action of ejectment against the party in possession.  Some pretty hard-faced trickery was attempted in the way of legislation, in order to help along the claim of the public; for, if the truth must be said, the public is just as wont to resort to such unworthy means to effect its purposes as private individuals, when it is deemed necessary.  But there was little fear of the “people’s” failing; they made the law, and they administered it, through their agents; the power being now so completely in their hands that it required twice the usual stock of human virtue to be able to say them nay, as had formerly been the case.  God help the man whose rights are to be maintained against the masses, when the immediate and dependent nominees of those masses are to sit in judgment!  If the public, by any inadvertency, have had the weakness to select servants that are superior to human infirmities, and who prefer to do right rather than to do as their masters would have them, it is a weakness that experience will be sure to correct, and which will not be often repeated.

The trial of this cause kept the Woolstons at the crater a week longer than they would have remained.  When the cause was submitted to the jury, Mr. Attorney-General had a great deal to say about aristocracy and privileged orders, as well as about the sacred rights of the people.  To hear him, one might have imagined that the Woolstons were princes in the full possession of their hereditary states, and who were dangerous to the liberties or the mass, instead of being what they really were,