“What!” said he, in a voice that made Crackenfudge leap at least a foot from the sofa.  “You pity me, do you!—­you, you diabolical eavesdropper, you pity me.  Sacred heaven!  And again, you searched through all Dublin for my daughter!—­carrying her disgrace and infamy wherever you appeared, and advertising them as you went along, like an emissary of shame and calumny, as you are.  Yes,” said he, as he foamed with the fury of a raging bull; “‘I—­I—­I,’ you might have said, ’a nameless whelp, sprung from the dishonest clippings of a counter—­I, I say, am in quest of Miss Gourlay, who has eloped with an adventurer, an impostor—­with a brushmaker’s clerk.’”

“A tooth-brush manufacturer, Sir Thomas, and, you know, they are often made of ivory.”

“Come, you intermeddling rascal, I must either tear you asunder or my brain will burst; I will not have such a worthless life as yours on my hands, however; you vermin, out with you; I might have borne anything but your compassion, and even that too; but to blazon through a gaping metropolis the infamy of my family—­of all that was dear to me—­to turn the name of my child into a polluted word, which modest lips would feel ashamed to utter; nor, lastly, can I forgive you the crime of making me suffer this mad and unexampled agony.”

Action now took the place of words, and had, indeed, come in as an auxiliary for some time previous.  He seized the unfortunate Crackenfudge, and as, with red and dripping lips, he gave vent to the furious eruptions of his fiery spirit, like a living Vesuvius—­for we know of no other comparison so appropriate—­he kicked and cuffed the wretched and unlucky intelligencer, until he fairly threw him out at the hall-door, which he himself shut after him.

“Begone, villain!” he exclaimed; “and may you never die till you feel the torments which you have kindled, like the flames of hell, within me!”

On entering the room again, he found, however, that with a being even so wretched and contemptible as Crackenfudge, there had departed a portion of his strength.  So long as he had an object on which to launch his fury, he felt that he could still sustain the battle of his passions.  But now a heavy sense came over him, as if of something which he could not understand or analyze.  His heart sank, and he felt a nameless and indescribable terror within him—­a terror, he thought, quite distinct from the conduct of his daughter, or of anything else he had heard.  He had, in fact, lost all perception of his individual misery, and a moral gloom, black as night, seemed to cover and mingle with those fiery tortures which were consuming him.  An apprehension, also, of immediate dissolution came over him—­his memory grew gradually weaker and weaker, until he felt himself no longer able to account for the scene which had just taken place; and for a brief period, although he neither swooned nor fainted, nor fell into a fit of any kind, he experienced a stupor that