d scratching, and
a-pulling of eyes out. A nice figure you'd cut among 'em! You'd be
a-wishing yourself home again afore you'd tried it for a day. Don't you
be a fool, Susan Peckaby."

"Don't you!" retorted she. "I wonder you ain't afraid o' some judgment
falling on you. Lies is sure to come home to people."

"Just take your thoughts back to the time as we had the shop here, and
plenty o' custom in it. One day you saw me just a-kissing of a girl in
that there corner--leastways you fancied as you saw me," corrected
Peckaby, coughing down his slip. "Well, d'ye recollect the scrimmage?
Didn't you go a'most mad, never keeping' your tongue quiet for a week,
and the place hardly holding of ye? How 'ud you like to have eight or
ten more of 'em, my married wives, like you be, brought in here?"

"You _are_ a fool, Peckaby. The cases is different."

"Where's the difference?" asked Peckaby. "The men be men, out there; and
the women be women. I might pertend as I'd had visions and revelations
sent to me, and dress myself up in a black coat and a white
neck-an-kecher, and suchlike paycock's plumes--I might tar and feather
myself if I pleased, if it come to that--and give out as I was a prophit
and a Latter Day Saint; but where 'ud be the difference, I want to know?
I should just be as good and as bad a man as I be now, only a bit more
of a hypocrite. Saints and prophits, indeed! You just come to your
senses, Susan Peckaby."

"I haven't lost 'em yet," answered she, looking inclined to beat him.

"You have lost 'em; to suppose as a life, out with them reptiles, could
be anything but just what I telled you--a hell. It can't be otherways.
It's again human female natur. If you went angry mad with jealousy, just
at fancying you see a innocent kiss give upon a girl's face, how 'ud you
do, I ask, when it come to wives? Tales runs as them 'saints' have got
any number a-piece, from four or five, up to seventy. If you don't come
to your senses, Mrs. Peckaby, you'll get a walloping, to bring you to
'em; and that's about it. You be the laughing-stock o' the place as it
is."

He swung out at the door, and took his way towards the nearest
public-house, intending to solace himself with a pint of ale, in lieu of
tea, of which he saw no chance. Mrs. Peckaby burst into a flood of
tears, and apostrophised the expected white donkey in moving terms: that
he would forthwith appear and bear her off from Peckaby and trouble, to
the triumphs and deli