e--think shame--think black-burning shame o' yoursell, ye born
and bred ruffian!" roared out the wife at the top story of her
voice--shaking her doubled nieve before him--stamping her heels on the
causey--then, drawing herself up, and holding her hands on her
hainches--"Just look, I tell ye, you unhanged blackguard, at your
precious handywark! Just look, what think ye of that, now? Tak' another
look now, ower that fief-like fiery nose o' yours, ye regardless Pagan!"

Flesh and blood could stand this no longer; and I saw Cursecowl's anger
boiling up within him, as in a red-hot fiery furnace.

"Wait a wee, my woman," muttered Cursecowl to himself, as, swearing
between his teeth, he hurried into the killing-booth.

Furious as the woman, however, was, she had yet enough of common sense
remaining within her to dread skaith; so, apprehending the bursting
storm, she had just taken to her heels, when out he came, rampauging
after her like a Greenland bear, with a large liver in each hand;--the
one of which, after describing a circle round his head, flashed after her
like lightning, and hearted her between the shoulders like a clap of
thunder; while the other, as he was repeating the volley, slipping
sideways from his fingers while he was driving it with all his force,
played drive directly through the window where I was standing, and gave
me such a yerk on the side of the head, that it could be compared to
nothing else but the lines written on the stucco image of Shakspeare, the
great playactor, on our parlour chimneypiece,

"The great globe itself,
Yea, all that it inherits, shall dissolve;"

and I lay speechless on the floor for goodness knows the length of time.
Even when I came to my recollection, it was partly to a sense of torment;
for Nanse, coming into the room, and not knowing the cause of my
disastrous overthrow, attributed it all to a fit of the apoplexy; and, in
her frenzy of affliction, had blistered all my nose with her Sunday scent-
bottle of aromatic vinegar.

For some weeks after there was a bumming in my ears, as if all the bee-
skeps on the banks of the Esk had been pent up within my head; and though
Reuben Cursecowl paid, like a gentleman, for the four panes he had
broken, he drove into me, I can assure him, in a most forcible and
striking manner, the truth of the old proverb--which is the moral of this
chapter--that "listeners seldom hear any thing to their own advantage."

CHAPTER XXVI