"I am not a fighting man; but if any man strikes me, let him beware for himself. I am not to be stopped on a public highway, like this."
As Mr. Penniloe spoke, he unwisely closed his umbrella, and holding it as a staff of defence, advanced against the enemy.
One step was all the advance he made, for ere he could take another, he was collared, and tripped up, and cast forward heavily upon his forehead. There certainly was a great stone in the mud; but he never knew whether it was that, or a blow from a stick, or even the ebony knob of his own umbrella, that struck him so violently as he fell; but the effect was that he lay upon his face, quite stunned, and in danger of being smothered in the muck.
"Up with's coat-tails! Us'll dust his jacket. Ring the bull on 'un—one, two, dree, vour."
The four stood round, with this very fine Christian, ready—as the Christian faith directs, for weak members, not warmed up with it,—ready to take everything he could not help; and the four switches hummed in the air with delight, like the thirsty swords of Homer; when a rush as of many winds swept them back to innocence. A man of great stature, and with blazing eyes, spent no words upon them, but lifted up the biggest with a chuck below his chin, which sent him sprawling into the ditch, with a broken jaw, then took another by the scruff of his small clothes, and hefted him into a dog-rose stool, which happened to stand on the top of the hedge with shark's teeth ready for their business; then he leaped over the prostrate Parson, but only smote vacant air that time. "The devil, the devil, 'tis the devil himself!" cried the two other fellows, cutting for their very lives.
"Reckon, I were not a breath too soon;" said the man who had done it, as he lifted Mr. Penniloe, whose lips were bubbling and nose clotted up; "why, they would have killed 'e in another minute, my dear. D—d if I bain't afeared they has done it now."
That the clergyman should let an oath pass unrebuked, would have been proof enough to any one who knew him that it never reached his mind. His silver hair was clogged with mud, and his gentle face begrimed with it, and his head fell back between the big man's knees, and his blue eyes rolled about without seeing earth or heaven.
"That doiled Jemmy Fox, we wants 'un now. Never knowed a doctor come, when a' were wanted. Holloa, you be moving there, be you? You dare stir, you murderer!" It was one of the men lately pitched into the hedge; but he only groaned again, at that great voice.
"Do 'e veel a bit better now, my dear? I've a girt mind to kill they two hosebirds in the hedge; and what's more, I wull, if 'e don't came round pretty peart."