Reaching out her long bare arm, she brought it around like the boom of a sloop, and with one wide sweep knocked his hat spinning to the sidewalk at her feet.
THE CLERGYMAN IN LIMBO.
He stooped to pick it up again, and while bent in the act, she seized him by the hair with both hands, and giving a guttural laugh, not unlike the self-satisfied croak of a down east bullfrog, exclaimed:—
“Ah! Barney, ye galavantin’ spalpeen! ye can’t desave me wid yer stove-pipe! So ye’d dezart the wife o’ yer boosome, would ye? ah, ha! come home wid me now, or I’ll be afther takin’ your durty ould scalp along wid me!”
A soft rabbit under the wide paw of a California lion, or a sparrow in the talons of a hawk, is not more utterly helpless than was the poor dominie in her terrible clutch. His position was anything but an enviable one. It actually seemed as if every hair upon his head was gathered and drawn into one mass, over which her muscular fingers held complete control.
He dropped his book and shouted loudly, partly through pain, and partly anger at seeing the fate of his fashionable hat, now lying under her great broad foot, flat as a German pancake.
His cries of fear only made the crazy woman more confident of her abilities. She commenced backing along the street, in the direction of home, and at every step, with an irresistible yank, she dragged the expostulating minister along with her over the uneven sidewalk.
She had snaked him along fully two rods in this manner, and was making, to use a nautical phrase, such good stern-way that she was on the point of breaking into a trot, when her heel caught on the edge of a plank.
The result was terrible in the extreme.