CHAPTER III.
The Jacobite.
Mr.William Kneebone was a woollen-draper of "credit and renown," whose place of business was held at the sign of the Angel (for, in those days, every shop had its sign), opposite Saint Clement's church in the Strand.

A native of Manchester, he was the son of Kenelm Kneebone, a staunch Catholic, and a sergeant of dragoons, who lost his legs and his life while fighting for James the Second at the battle of the Boyne, and who had little to bequeath his son except his laurels and his loyalty to the house of Stuart.
The gallant woollen-draper was now in his thirty-sixth year.

He had a handsome, jolly-looking face; stood six feet two in his stockings; and measured more than a cloth-yard shaft across the shoulders--athletic proportions derived from his father the dragoon.

And, if it had not been for a taste for plotting, which was continually getting him into scrapes, he might have been accounted a respectable member of society.
Of late, however, his plotting had assumed a more dark and dangerous complexion.

The times were such that, with the opinions he entertained, he could not remain idle.