my hand, they helped him up. The first thing that his reverence did, on
being placed on his legs, was to make for a horse-whip, which stood in
one corner of the room, but I guessing how he meant to use it, sprang up
from the floor, and before he could make a cut at me, ran out of the
room, and hasted home. The next day, when all the people for twenty
miles round met in the chapel, in the expectation of seeing me presented
to them a purified and holy female, and hearing from my mouth the account
of the miracle which his reverence had performed, his reverence made his
appearance in the pulpit with a dale of gould bater's leaf on his nose,
and from the pulpit he told the people how I had used him, showing them
the gould bater's leaf on his feature, as testimony of the truth of his
words, finishing by saying that if at first there were seven devils,
there were now seven times seven within me. Well, when the people heard
the story, and saw his nose with the bater's leaf upon it, they at first
began to laugh, but when he appealed to their consciences, and asked them
if such was fitting tratement for a praist, they said it was not, and
that if he would only but curse me, they would soon do him justice upon
me. His reverence then cursed by book, bell, and candle, and the people,
setting off from the chapel, came in a crowd to the house where I lived,
to wrake vengeance upon me. Overtaking my son by the way, who was coming
home in a state of intoxication, they bate him within an inch of his
life, and left him senseless on the ground, and no doubt would have
served me much worse, only seeing them coming, and guessing what they
came about, though I was a bit intoxicated myself, I escaped by the back
of the house out into the bog, where I hid myself amidst a copse of
hazels. The people coming to the house, and not finding me there, broke
and destroyed every bit of furniture, and would have pulled the house
down, or set fire to it, had not an individual among them cried out that
doing so would be of no use, for that the house did not belong to me, and
that destroying it would merely be an injury to the next tenant. So the
people, after breaking my furniture and ill-trating two or three dumb
beasts, which happened not to have been made away with, went away, and in
the dead of night I returned to the house, where I found my son, who had
just crawled home covered wit bruises. We hadn't, however, a home long,
for the agents of th