"Do you want to make me out a swindler?"
"No need to make you one!"
"You dirty old sail-cobbler!"
"Jail-bird!"
"You're an old drunkard!"
"Drunkard yourself! You've got no call to abuse decent people!"
"I'll knock in half a dozen of your teeth!"
"And I'll make you walk lame, my fine fellow. Bankrupt!"
Then the fight was on. After exhausting all the terms of abuse usual in the locality, the imagination of both rascals would invent new ones of the most audacious sort, until this capital too was used up, and the two fighting-cocks would totter back to the house, exhausted and embittered.
Neither had any dearer wish than to get the better of the other and make him feel his superiority; but if Hürlin had the better brain, the sailmaker was the more cunning--and since the weaver took no side, neither could claim a real triumph over the other. Both longed ardently to attain a position of superior consideration in the house; and they employed for this purpose so much energy, caution, thought, and secret obstinacy that with the half of these either of them, if he had put it to use at the right time, might have kept his bark afloat instead of becoming a Sun-Brother.