her to dread skaith; so, apprehending the bursting
storm, she had just taken to her heels, when out he came, rampauging
after her like a Greenland bear, with a large liver in each hand;--the
one of which, after describing a circle round his head, flashed after her
like lightning, and hearted her between the shoulders like a clap of
thunder; while the other, as he was repeating the volley, slipping
sideways from his fingers while he was driving it with all his force,
played drive directly through the window where I was standing, and gave
me such a yerk on the side of the head, that it could be compared to
nothing else but the lines written on the stucco image of Shakspeare, the
great playactor, on our parlour chimneypiece,

"The great globe itself,
Yea, all that it inherits, shall dissolve;"

and I lay speechless on the floor for goodness knows the length of time.
Even when I came to my recollection, it was partly to a sense of torment;
for Nanse, coming into the room, and not knowing the cause of my
disastrous overthrow, attributed it all to a fit of the apoplexy; and, in
her frenzy of affliction, had blistered all my nose with her Sunday
scent-bottle of aromatic vinegar.

For some weeks after there was a bumming in my ears, as if all the
bee-skeps on the banks of the Esk had been pent up within my head; and
though Reuben Cursecowl paid, like a gentleman, for the four panes he had
broken, he drove into me, I can assure him, in a most forcible and
striking manner, the truth of the old proverb--which is the moral of this
chapter that "listeners seldom hear anything to their own advantage."

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT--MANSIE WAUCH ON SOME SERIOUS MUSINGS

After consultation with friends, and much serious consideration on such a
momentous subject, it having been finally settled on between the wife and
myself to educate Benjie to the barber and haircutting line, we looked
round about us in the world for a suitable master to whom we might
entrust our dear laddie, he having now finished his education, and
reached his fourteenth year.

It was visible in a twinkling to us both, that his apprenticeship could
not be gone through with at home in that first-rate style which would
enable him to reach the top of the tree in his profession; yet it gave us
a sore heart to think of sending away, at so tender an age, one who was
so dear to his mother and me, and whom we had, as it were, in a manner
made a pet of; so we re