“Think shame—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 anything to their own advantage.”