asping Joe by the hand and arm, "I've had it again!
You don't know how it shoots through my veins. I--I've tried to break
with it, too--tried--tried! D'ee know what it is to try, Joe, to try--
try--try till your blood curdles, an' your marrow boils, and your nerves
tingle--but I gained the victory once--I--ha! ha! yes, I took the pledge
an' kep' it, an' I've bin all right--till to-night. My Mary knows that.
She'll tell you it's true--for months, and months, and months, and--but
I'll keep it _yet_!"

He shouted his last words in a tone of fierce defiance, let go his
friend, caught up the sledge-hammer, and, whirling it round his head as
if it had been a mere toy, turned to rush towards the sea.

But Joe's strong arm arrested him. Well did he understand the nature of
the awful fiend, with which the blacksmith was fighting. The scene
enacting was, with modifications, somewhat familiar to him, for he had
dwelt near a great city where many a comrade had fallen in the same
fight, never more to rise in this life.

Joe's superior strength told for a moment, and he held the struggling
madman fast, but before Dominick and the doctor could spring to his aid,
Nobbs had burst from him. The brief check, however, seemed to have
changed his intentions. Possibly he was affected by some hazy notion
that it would be a quicker end to leap headlong from the neighbouring
cliffs than to plunge into the sea. At all events, he ran like a deer
up towards the woods. A bonfire, round which the revellers had made
merry, lay in his path. He went straight through it, scattering the
firebrands right and left. No one attempted, no one dared, to stop him,
but God put a check in his way. The course he had taken brought him
straight up to the row of casks which stood on the other side of the
fire, and again his wild mood was changed. With a yell of triumph he
brought the sledge-hammer down on one of the casks, drove in the head,
and overturned it with the same blow, and the liquor gushing out flowed
into the fire, where it went up in a magnificent roar of flame.

The effect on those of the rioters who were not too drunk to understand
anything, was to draw forth a series of wild cheers, but high above
these rang the triumphant shout of the blacksmith as he gazed at the
destruction of his enemy.

By this time all the people in the settlement had turned out, and were
looking on in excitement, alarm, or horror, according to temperament.
Amon