“‘No,’ said one of them, a determined man he was, ’that wasn’t in our agreement, nor it isn’t in our hearts, to trate the innocent like the guilty.’”

“‘It must be done,’ said the captain.

“‘No,’ said the other back to him, ’the first man that mislists a hair of one of his family’s heads, I’ll put the contents of this through him—­if this onmanly act had been mentioned before, you’d a’ had few here tonight along wid you.’

“Well, sure enough, the most of us was wid the last speaker, so, instead of cardin’ the sick procthor before his own family, we tied and gagged him so as that he neither spoke nor budged, and afther clappin’ a guard upon the family for an hour or two, we put him on horseback and brought him up to where the grave was made.  We then stripped him, and layin’ him across a ditch, we got the implements, of the feadhers as we call them, to tickle him.  Well, now, could you guess, boys, what these feadhers was?  I’ll go bail you couldn’t, so I may as well tell you at wanst; divil resave the thing else, but half-a-dozen of the biggest tom-cats we could get, and this is the way we used them.  Two or three of us pitched our hands well and the tails of the cats into the bargain, we then, as I said, laid the naked procthor across a ditch, and began to draw the tom-cats down the flesh of his back.  God! how the unfortunate divil quivered and writhed and turned—­until the poor wake crature, that at first had hardly the strength of a child, got, by the torture he suffered, the strength of three men; for indeed, afther he broke the cords that tied him, three, nor three more the back o’ that, wasn’t sufficient to hould him.  He got the gag out of his mouth, too, and then, I declare to my Saviour his scrames was so awful that we got frightened, for we couldn’t but think that the voice was unnatural, an sich as no man ever heard.  We set to, however, and gagged and tied him agin, and then we carded him—­first down, then up, then across by one side, and after that across by the other. * Well, when this was done, we tuk him as aisily an’ as purtily as we could.

“D—­n your soul, you ould ras—­rascal,” said the person they called Ned, “you wor—­wor ‘all a parcel o’ bloody, d—­n, hell—­fi—­fire cowardly villains, to—­to—­thrat—­ate any fellow crature—­crature in sich a way.  Why didn’t you shoo—­shoo—­oot him at wanst, an’ not put—­ut him through hell’s tor—­tortures like that, you bloody-minded ould dog!”

To tell the truth, many of them were shocked at the old carder’s narrative, but he only, grinned at them, and replied—­

“Ay, shoot—­you may talk about shootin,’ Ned, avick, but for all that life’s sweet.”

“Get on—­out, you ould sinner o’ perdition—­to blazes wid you; life’s sweet you ould ‘shandina—­what a purty—­urty way you tuk of sweetenin’ it for him.  I tell—­ell you, Bil—­lilly Bradly, that you’ll never die on your bed for that night’s wo—­ork.”

“And even if I don’t, Ned, you won’t have my account to answer for.”