the greater enjoyment.

Things being thus disposed, and a servant employed in laying the cloth,
their ears were of a sudden invaded by a strange tumultuous noise in the
next room, occasioned by the overthrow of tables, chairs, and glasses,
with odd unintelligible exclamations in broken French, and a jargon of
threats in the Welsh dialect. Our young gentlemen ran immediately into
the apartment from whence this clamour seemed to proceed, and found a
thin, meagre, swarthy figure, gasping, in all the agony of fear, under
the hands of a squat, thick, hard-featured man, who collared him with
great demonstrations of wrath, saying, "If you was as mighty a magician
as Owen Glendower or the witch of Entor, look you, ay, ay, or as Paul
Beor himself, I will meke pold, by the assistance of Got, and in his
majesty's name, to seize and secure, and confine and confront you, until
such time as you suffer and endure and undergo the pains and penalties
of the law, for your diabolical practices. Shentlements," added he,
turning to our adventurers, "I take you to witness, that I protest, and
assert, and avow, that this person is as pig a necromancer as you would
desire to behold; and I supplicate, and beseech, and entreat of you,
that he may be prought pefore his petters, and compelled to give an
account of his compact and commerce with the imps of darkness, look you;
for, as I am a Christian soul, and hope for joyful resurrection, I have
this plessed evening seen him perform such things as could not be done
without the aid and instruction and connivance of the tevil."

Gauntlet seemed to enter into the sentiments of this Welsh reformer,
and actually laid hold on the delinquent's shoulder, crying, "D--n the
rascal! I'll lay any wager that he's a Jesuit; for none of his order
travel without a familiar." But Peregrine, who looked upon the affair
in another point of view, interposed in behalf of the stranger, whom he
freed from his aggressors, observing, that there was no occasion to use
violence; and asked, in French, what he had done to incur the censure of
the informer. The poor foreigner, more dead than alive, answered that
he was an Italian charlatan, who had practised with some reputation
in Padua, until he had the misfortune to attract the notice of the
Inquisition, by exhibiting certain wonderful performances by his skill
in natural knowledge, which that tribunal considered as the effects of
sorcery, and persecuted him accordingly; so