hundred--owed me here; and that miscreant
won't give me a day.'

'Is it the rent, Barney?'

'The rent? To be sure; what else should it be?' shouted the doctor, with
a stamp.

And so pale little Mrs. Sturk stole out of the room, as her lord with
bitter mutterings pitched his treasure of bad bills back again into the
escritoire: and she heard him slam the study door and run down stairs to
browbeat and curse the men in the hall, for he had lost his head
somewhat, between panic and fury. He was in his stockings and slippers,
with an old flowered silk dressing-gown, and nothing more but his shirt,
and looked, they said, like a madman. One of the fellows was smoking,
and Sturk snatched the pipe from his mouth, and stamped it to atoms on
the floor, roaring at them to know what the ---- brought them there; and
without a pause for an answer, thundered, 'And I suppose you'll not let
me take my box of instruments out of the house--mind, it's worth fifty
pounds; and curse me, if one of our men dies for want of them in
hospital, I'll indict you both, and your employer along with you, _for
murder!_' And so he railed on, till his voice failed him with a sort of
choking, and there was a humming in his ears, and a sort of numbness in
his head, and he thought he was going to have a fit; and then up the
stairs he went again, and into his study, and resolved to have Nutter
out--and it flashed upon him that he'd say, 'Pay the rent first;' and
then--what next? why he'd post him all over Dublin, and Chapelizod, and
Leixlip, where the Lord Lieutenant and Court were.

And down he sat to a sheet of paper, with his left hand clenched on the
table, and his teeth grinding together, as he ransacked his vocabulary
for befitting terms; but alas, his right hand shook so that his
penmanship would not do, in fact, it half frightened him. 'By my soul! I
believe something bad has happened me,' he muttered, and popped up his
window, and looked out, half dreaming over the church-yard on the park
beyond, and the dewy overhanging hill, all pleasantly lighted up in the
morning sun.

While this was going on, little Mrs. Sturk, who on critical occasions
took strong resolutions promptly, made a wonderfully rapid toilet, and
let herself quietly out of the street door. She had thought of Dr.
Walsingham; but Sturk had lately, in one of his imperious freaks of
temper, withdrawn his children from the good doctor's catechetical
class, and sent him besides, one of