The baronet grew black in the face, as he always did when in a passion, and especially when replied to.

“You are a lying scoundrel, sirra,” continued the other; “the bog does not belong to you, and I will set it to the devil if I like.”

“I know nobody so fit to be your tenant,” replied Trailcudgel.  “But I am no scoundrel, Sir Thomas,” added the independent fellow, “and there’s very few dare tell me so but yourself.”

“What, you villain! do you contradict me? do you bandy words and looks with me?” asked the baronet, his rage deepening at Trailcudgel’s audacity in having replied at all.

“Villain!” returned his gigantic tenant, in a voice of thunder.  “You called me a scoundrel, sirra, and you have called me a villain, sirra, now I tell you to your teeth, you’re a liar—­I am neither villain nor scoundrel; but you’re both; and if I hear another word of insolence out of your foul and lying mouth, I’ll thrash you as I would a shafe of whate or oats.”

The black hue of the baronet’s rage changed to a much modester tint; he looked upon the face of the sturdy yeoman, now flushed with honest resentment; he looked upon the eye that was kindled at once into an expression of resolution and disdain; and turning on his toe, proceeded at a pace by no means funereal to the steps of the hall-door, and having ascended them, he turned round and said, in a very mild and quite a gentlemanly tone,

“Oh, very well, Mr. Trailcudgel; very well, indeed.  I have a memory, Mr. Trailcudgel—­I have a memory.  Good morning!”

“Betther for you to have a heart,” replied Trailcudgel; “what you never had.”

Having uttered these words he departed, conscious at the same time, from his knowledge of his landlord’s unrelenting malignity, that his own fate was sealed, and his ruin accomplished.  And he was right.  In the course of four years after their quarrel, Trailcudgel found himself, and his numerous family, in the scene of destitution to which we are about to conduct the indulgent reader.

We pray you, therefore, gentle reader, to imagine yourself in a small cabin, where there are two beds—­that is to say, two scanty portions of damp straw, spread out thinly upon a still damper foot of earth, in a portion of which the foot sinks when walking over it.  The two beds—­each what is termed a shake down—­have barely covering enough to preserve the purposes of decency, but not to communicate the usual and necessary warmth.  In consequence of the limited area of the cabin floor they are not far removed from each other.  Upon a little three-legged stool, between them, burns a dim rush candle, whose light is so exceedingly feeble that it casts ghastly and death-like shadows over the whole inside of the cabin.  That family consists of nine persons, of whom five are lying ill of fever, as the reader, from the nature of their bedding, may have already anticipated—­for we must observe here, that the epidemic was rife at