Next morning, however, a writ or a process of some sort, from which great things were expected, was to issue from the court in which her rights were being vindicated.  Upon the granting of this, Mistress Matchwell and Dirty Davy—­estranged for some time, as we have said,—­embraced.  She forgot the attorney’s disrespectful language, and he the lady’s brass candlestick, and, over the punch-bowl of oblivion and vain glory, they celebrated their common victory.

Under advice, M. M. had acquiesced, pending her vigorous legal proceedings, in poor little Sally Nutter’s occupying her bed-room in the house for a little while longer.  The beleagured lady was comforted in her strait by the worthy priest, by honest Dr. Toole, and not least, by that handsome and stalworth nymph, the daring Magnolia.  That blooming Amazon was twice on the point of provoking the dismal sorceress, who kept her court in the parlour of the Mills, to single combat.  But fortune willed it otherwise, and each time the duel had been interrupted in its formal inception, and had gone no further than that spirited prologue in which the female sex so faithfully preserve the tradition of those thundering dialogues which invariably precede the manual business of the Homeric fray.

This was the eve of a great triumph and a memorable gala.  Next morning, Sally Nutter was to be scalped, roasted, and eaten up, and the night was spent in savage whoopings, songs and dances.  They had got a reprobate blind fiddler into the parlour, where their punch-bowl steamed—­a most agreeable and roistering sinner, who sang indescribable songs to the quaver of his violin, and entertained the company with Saturnalian vivacity, jokes, gibes, and wicked stories.  Larry Cleary, thou man of sin and music! methinks I see thee now.  Thy ugly, cunning, pitted face, twitching and grinning; thy small, sightless orbs rolling in thy devil’s merriment, and thy shining forehead red with punch.

In the kitchen things were not more orderly; M. M.’s lean maid was making merry with the bailiff, and a fat and dreadful trollop with one eye—­tipsy, noisy, and pugnacious.

Poor little Sally Nutter and her maids kept dismal vigil in her bed-room.  But that her neighbours and her lawyer would in no sort permit it, the truth is, the frightened little soul would long ago have made herself wings, and flown anywhere for peace and safety.

It is remarkable how long one good topic, though all that may be said upon it has been said many scores of times, will serve the colloquial purposes of the good folk of the kitchen or the nursery.  There was scarcely half-an-hour in the day during which the honest maids and their worthy little mistress did not discuss the dreadful Mary Matchwell.  They were one and all, though in different degrees, indescribably afraid of her.  Her necromantic pretensions gave an indistinctness and poignancy to their horror.  She seemed to know, by a diabolical intuition, what