a long breathed kiss; after which,
renewing his driving, and thus continuing to harass his rear, the height
of the fist came on with its usual symptoms, and dismissed the action.

The criminal scene they acted, I had the patience to see to an end,
purely that I might gather more facts and certainty against them in my
design to do their deserts instant justice; and accordingly, when they
had re-adjusted themselves; and were preparing to go out, burning as I
was with rage and indignation, I jumped down from the chair, in order
to raise the house upon them, but with such an unlucky impetuosity, that
some nail or ruggedness in the floor caught my foot, and flung me on my
face with such violence, that I fell senseless on the ground, and lay
there some time before any one came to my relief: so that they, alarmed,
I suppose, by the noise of my fall, had more than the necessary time
to make a safe retreat. This they effected, as I learnt, with a
precipitation nobody could account for, until, when come to myself, and
composed enough to speak, I acquainted those of the house with the whole
transaction I had been evidence to.

When I came home again, and told Mrs. Cole this adventure, she very
sensibly observed to me, that "there was no doubt of the due vengeance
one time or other overtaking these miscreants, however they might escape
for the present; and that, had I been the temporal instrument of it, I
should have been put to a great deal more trouble and confusion than
I imagined; that, as to the thing itself, the less said of it was the
better; but that though she might be suspected of partiality, from its
being the common cause of womankind, out of whose mouths this practice
tended to take something more than bread, yet she protested against any
mixture of passion, with a declaration extorted from her by pure regard
to truth; which was, that whatever effect this infamous passion had in
other ages and other countries, it seemed a peculiar blessing on our air
and climate, that there was a plaguespot visibly imprinted on all that
are tainted with it, in this nation at least, for that among numbers of
that stamp whom she had known, or at least were universally under the
scandalous suspicion of it, she would not name an exception hardly to
one of them, whose character was not, in all other respects, the most
worthless and despicable that could be; stript of all the manly virtues
of their own sex, and filled up with only the worst