. She
was meagrely and poorly dressed, had no cap on, her gray locks were only
bound by a red ribbon that encircled her head, but did not confine her
hair, which floated in large masses about her shoulders, a circumstance
that added to the startling vehemence of character that appeared in
her face, and gave to her whole person an expression which could not be
overlooked. When they had come up to where she sat, and were about to
pass without further notice, she started up, and with steps surprisingly
rapid, and full of energy, seized upon. Phil's bridle.

"Well!" she exclaimed, "I saw you going, and I see you coming, but you
cannot tell me that he is dead. No, the death damp of his blaspheming
carcase is not yet on the air, because if it was," and she turned her
nose against the wind, like a hound, "I would snuff it. No, no; he
is not gone, but he will soon go, and what a catalogue of crimes will
follow after him! The man's conscience is a gaol where every thought and
wish of his guilty life and godless heart is a felon; and the blackest
calendar that ever was spread before God was his. Oh! I wonder do the
chains in his conscience rattle? they do, but his ears are deaf, and he
doesn't hear them; but he will, and feel them too, yet."

Phil, who had got alarmed at the extraordinary energy of her manner,
as well as of her language, said, "what do you want, and who are you
speaking of?"

"Who am I speaking of? who should I be speaking of but of old Deaker,
the blasphemer?--and who am I speaking to but the son of the ungodly
villain who threatened to horsewhip the mother that bore him. Do you
know me now?"

"Let go my bridle," exclaimed Phil, "let go my bridle, you old faggot,
or upon my honor and soul I'll give you a cut of my whip."

"No," she replied, no whit daunted, "no, I'm near my eightieth year. I'm
old, and wrinkled, and gray--my memory forgets everything now but my own
crimes, and the crimes of those that are still worse than myself--old I
am, and wicked, and unrepenting--but I shall yet live to pour the curses
that rise out of an ill-spent life into his dying oar, until his very
soul will feel the scorches of perdition before its everlasting tortures
come upon it in hell. I am old," she proceeded, "but I will yet live
to see the son that cursed his mother, and threatened to raise his
sacrilegious hand against her that bore him, laid down like a tree,
rooted up and lopped--lying like a rotten log, without sap,