ear heart" on the violin, accompanying it with the words.
Again a noise was heard. "What can it be?" said one. "What can it be?"
said another. There was a push at the door. "Oh!" cried Hodgkinson,
"it's only one of the hogs that roam about the alley, who, having more
taste than the _old ones_, is come to hear our mirth and music." At this
moment the door was burst open, and John's master entered. Before the
latter had time to speak, or John to reflect, the boy's wit got the
better of his prudence, and he roared out, in the words of Hamlet, "Oh
my prophetic spirit! did I not tell you that it was a hog?" Hitherto the
master had never gone so far as to strike him; but now, enraged beyond
all control at what he saw and heard, he struck the boy with his fist in
the face, wrung the fiddle out of his hand, and smashed it to pieces on
his head. John, who could run like a greyhound, and well knew how far he
could trust to his heels, no sooner got out of the cellar than he let
loose the floodgates of his wrath, and poured forth upon his astonished
master a torrent of invective, partly the slang of the mob, and partly
supplied from plays and farces by his memory; then assuring "the ugly
illnatured hunks" that he never should see him again till he was able to
make his thick scull ring with a drubbing, he disappeared, and prepared
to leave Manchester.

A few months antecedent to this event, a circumstance occurred to
Hodgkinson the relation of which properly comes in here. Two persons,
genteelly dressed, coming to his mother's house, called for a room and
some beer, and asked if they could get dinner. It was Sunday, and John,
as usual, spent the day at home. He was busily employed in the entry
making a bridge for a fiddle, and, as he cut away, accompanied his
labour with a song, upon which a person belonging to the house[3] chid
him angrily or rather very severely for singing on the sabbath. He made
no other reply than that of changing from a soft song, which he barely
hummed, to the laughing song of Linco in Cymon, which he roared out
obstreperously, by way of asserting his independence. A verbal scuffle
ensued, which he still interlarded with bursts of song and laughter; the
door of the room opened; the two gentlemen interfered, and calling him
into the parlour, requested him to sing Linco's song through for them.
He complied; they lavished encomiums on his performance; and one of them
said to the other "I'll be hanged if he does n