rld about our ears. Such a stramash of tumbling,
roaring, tearing, swearing, kicking, pushing, cuffing, rugging and riving
about the floor!! I thought they would not have left one another with a
shirt on: it seemed a combat even to the death. Cursecowl's breath was
choked up within him like wind in an empty bladder, and when I got a
gliskie of his face, from beneath James's cowl, it was growing as black
as the crown of my hat. It feared me much that murder would be the
upshot, the webs being all heeled over, both of broad cloth, buckram,
cassimir, and Welsh flannel; and the paper shapings and worsted runds
coiled about their throats and bodies like fiery serpents. At long and
last, I thought it became me, being the head of the house, to sound a
parley, and bid them give the savage a mouthful of fresh air, to see if
he had anything to say in his defence.

Cursecowl, by this time, had forcible assurance of our ability to
overpower him, and finding he had by far the worst of it, was obliged to
grow tamer, using the first breath he got to cry out, "A barley, ye
thieves! a barley! I tell ye, give me wind. There's not a man in nine
of ye."

Finding our own strength, we saw, by this time, that we were masters of
the field; nevertheless, we took care to make good terms when they were
in our power; nor would we allow Cursecowl to sit upright, till after he
had said, three times over, on his honour as a gentleman, that he would
behave as became one. After giving his breeches-knees a skuff with his
loof, to dad off the stoure, he came, right foot foremost, to the counter
side, while the laddies were dighting their brows, and stowing away the
webs upon their ends round about, saying, "Maister Wauch, how have ye the
conscience to send hame such a piece o' wark as that coat to ony decent
man? Do ye dare to imagine that I am a Jerusalem spider, that I could be
crammed, neck and heels, into such a thing as that? Fye, shame--it would
not button on yourself, man, scarecrow-looking mortal though ye be!"

James Batter's blood was now up, and boiling like an old Roman's; so he
was determined to show Cursecowl that I had a friend in court, able and
willing to keep him at stave's-end. "Keep a calm sough," said James
Batter, interfering, "and not miscall the head of the house in his own
shop; or, to say nothing of present consequences, byway of showing ye the
road to the door, perhaps Maister Sneckdrawer, the penny-writer, 'll give