ssions!
Have you common courage? No; I tell you to your teeth that none but
spiritless caitiffs and cowards would, in the presence of death and
sorrow--in the miserable cabin of the destitute widow and her orphan
boy--exhibit the ruffianly outrages of men who are wanton in their
cruelty, merely because they know there is none to resist them; and I
may add, because they think that their excesses, however barbarous, will
be shielded by higher authority. No, I tell you, if there stood man for
man before you, even without arms in their hands, you would not dare to
act and swagger as you do, or to play these cruel pranks of oppression
and tyranny anywhere, much less in the house of death and affliction.
Fie upon you, you are a disgrace to everything that is human, a reproach
to every feeling of manhood, and every principle of religion."

Hardened as they were by the habits of their profligate and debasing
employment, such was the ascendancy of manly truth and and moral feeling
over them, that for a minute or two they quailed under the indignant
glance of Harman. Steele drew back his gun, and looked round on his
companions to ascertain their feeling.

"Gentleman," said Father Roche, anxious to mollify them as much as he
could--"gentleman, for the sake of that poor heart-broken widowed woman
and her orphan son--for her and his sake, and if not for theirs then,
for the sake of God himself, before whose awful judgment-seat we must
all stand to render an account of our works, I entreat--I implore you to
withdraw--do, gentlemen, and leave her and her children to their sorrows
and their misery, for the world has little else for them."

"I'm willing to go," said a fellow, ironically called Handsome Hacket,
because he was blind of an eye and deeply pock-pitted--"there's no use
in quarrellin' with a woman certainly--and I don't think there can be
any doubt about the man's death; devil a bit."

"Well said, Vainus," exclaimed Sharpe, "and it is not ten days since
we were defrauded of Parra Rackan who escaped from us in Jemmy Reilly's
coffin--when we thought to nab him in the wakehouse--and when we went
away didn't they set him at large, and then go back to bury the man that
was dead. Now, how da you know, Vainus, my purty boy, that this fellow's
not playin' us a trick o' the same color?"

"Come, come," said another of them who had not yet spoke, "it's aisy
to know that. Curse me, Steele, if you don't give him a tickle, I
will--that