arm'd Fenians"

"Are you sure you are translating that last epithet correctly, Hector?"

"Quite sure, sir," answered Hector, doggedly.

"Because I should have thought the nudity might have been quoted as
existing in a different part of the body."

Disdaining to reply to this insinuation, Hector proceeded in his
recitation:

"I shall think it no great harm
To wring your bald head from your shoulders--

But what is that yonder?" exclaimed Hector, interrupting himself.

"One of the herd of Proteus," said the Antiquary--"a phoca, or seal,
lying asleep on the beach."

Upon which M'Intyre, with the eagerness of a young sportsman, totally
forgot both Ossian, Patrick, his uncle, and his wound, and exclaiming--"I
shall have her! I shall have her!" snatched the walking-stick out of the
hand of the astonished Antiquary, at some risk of throwing him down, and
set off at full speed to get between the animal and the sea, to which
element, having caught the alarm, she was rapidly retreating.

Not Sancho, when his master interrupted his account of the combatants of
Pentapolin with the naked arm, to advance in person to the charge of
the flock of sheep, stood more confounded than Oldbuck at this sudden
escapade of his nephew.

"Is the devil in him," was his first exclamation, "to go to disturb
the brute that was never thinking of him!"--Then elevating his voice,
"Hector--nephew--fool--let alone the Phoca--let alone the Phoca!-- they bite,
I tell you, like furies. He minds me no more than a post. There--there
they are at it--Gad, the Phoca has the best of it! I am glad to see it,"
said he, in the bitterness of his heart, though really alarmed for his
nephew's safety--"I am glad to see it, with all my heart and spirit."

In truth, the seal, finding her retreat intercepted by the light-footed
soldier, confronted him manfully, and having sustained a heavy blow
without injury, she knitted her brows, as is the fashion of the animal
when incensed, and making use at once of her fore-paws and her unwieldy
strength, wrenched the weapon out of the assailant's hand, overturned
him on the sands, and scuttled away into the sea, without doing him any
farther injury. Captain M'Intyre, a good deal out of countenance at
the issue of his exploit, just rose in time to receive the ironical
congratulations of his uncle, upon a single combat worthy to be
commemorated by Ossian himself, "since," said the Antiqua