However, I did not let go my hold, but kept
pulling at the nose, till at last to avoid the torment, his
reverence came tumbling down upon me, causing me by his weight to
fall back upon the floor. At the yell which he gave, and at the
noise of the fall, in came rushing his reverence's housekeeper and
stable-boy, who seeing us down on the floor, his reverence upon me
and my hand holding his reverence's nose, for I felt loth to let it
go, they remained in astonishment and suspense. When his
reverence, however, begged them, for the Virgin's sake, to separate
him from the divil of a woman, they ran forward, and having with
some difficulty freed his reverence's nose from my hand, they
helped him up. The first thing that his reverence did, on being
placed on his legs, was to make for a horse-whip, which stood in
one corner of the room, but I guessing how he meant to use it,
sprang up from the floor, and before he could make a cut at me, ran
out of the room, and hasted home. The next day, when all the
people for twenty miles round met in the chapel, in the expectation
of seeing me presented to them a purified and holy female, and
hearing from my mouth the account of the miracle which his
reverence had performed, his reverence made his appearance in the
pulpit with a dale of gould bater's leaf on his nose, and from the
pulpit he told the people how I had used him, showing them the
gould bater's leaf on his feature, as testimony of the truth of his
words, finishing by saying that if at first there were seven
devils, there were now seven times seven within me. Well, when the
people heard the story, and saw his nose with the bater's leaf upon
it, they at first began to laugh, but when he appealed to their
consciences, and asked them if such was fitting tratement for a
praist, they said it was not, and that if he would only but curse
me, they would soon do him justice upon me. His reverence then
cursed by book, bell, and candle, and the people, setting off from
the chapel, came in a crowd to the house where I lived, to wrake
vengeance upon me. Overtaking my son by the way, who was coming
home in a state of intoxication, they bate him within an inch of
his life, and left him senseless on the ground, and no doubt would
have served me much worse, only seeing them coming, and guessing
what they came about, though I was a bit intoxicated myself, I
escaped by the back of the house out into the bog, where I hid
myself amidst a copse of hazels. The people coming to the house,
and not finding me there, broke and destroyed every bit of
furniture, and would have pulled the house down, or set fire to it,
had not an individual among them cried out that doing so would be
of no use, for that the house did not belong to me, and that
destroying it would merely be an injury to the next tenant.
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