“Is it thrue,” he asked, “that you've dared to refuse to this—this—unfor—is it thrue that you've dared to refuse this girl and her starvin' father and mother the meal she wanted? Is this thrue, you hard-hearted ould scoundrel?—bekaise if it is, by the blessed sky above us, I'll pull the wind-pipe out of you, you infernal miser!”
He seized unfortunate Skinadre by the neck, as he spoke, and almost at the same moment forced him to project his tongue about three inches out of his mouth, causing his face at the same time to assume, by the violence of the act, an expression of such comic distress and terror, as it was difficult to look upon with gravity.
“Is it thrue,” he repeated, in a voice of thunder, “that you've dared to do so scoundrelly an act, an' she, the unfortunate creature, famishing wid hunger herself?”
While he spake, he held Skinadre's neck as if in a vice—firm in the same position—and the latter, of course, could do nothing more than turn his ferret eyes round as well as he could, to entreat him to relax his grip.
“Don't choke him, Tom,” exclaimed Hacket, who came forward, to interpose; “you'll strangle him; as Heaven's above, you will.”
“An' what great crime would that be?” answered the other, relaxing his awful grip of the miser. “Isn't he an' every cursed meal-monger like him a curse and a scourge to the counthry—and hasn't the same counthry curses and scourges enough widhout either him or them? Answer me now,” he proceeded, turning to Skinadre, “why did you send her away widout the food she wanted?”
“My heart bled for her; but—”
“It's a lie, you born hypocrite—it's a lie—your heart never bled for anything, or anybody.”
“But you don't know,” replied the miser, “what I lost by—”
“It's a lie, I say,” thundered out the gigantic young fellow, once more seizing the unfortunate meal-monger by the throat, when out again went his tongue, like a piece of machinery touched by a spring, and again were the red eyes now almost starting out of his head, turned round, whilst he himself was in a state of suffocation, that rendered his appearance ludicrous beyond description—“it's a lie, I say, for you have neither thruth nor heart—that's what we all know.”