the public houses , taverns , ordinaries , and pothouses in charlotte were doing a roaring business , as delegates , spectators , and hangers-on seethed through them , men of loyalist sentiments collecting in the king 's arms , those of rabidly opposing views in the blue boar , with shifting currents of the unallied and undecided eddying to and fro , purling through the goose and oyster , thomas 's ordinary , the groats , simon 's , buchanan 's , mueller 's , and two or three nameless places that barely qualified as shebeens .