In the midst of this, succour arrived for the invaded party in the person of no less a hero than Mr. David Shaw. In a state of exasperation amounting almost to frenzy, that individual rushed into the house, crying out as he impetuously advanced, “Where is she?--where is she?”--the idea that Mrs. Clink had purposely betrayed them being alone uppermost in his mind. Making his way, as if instinctively, towards the stairs, he beheld something like the figure of a woman standing three or four steps above him, for the light was not sufficient to discover more. A plunge with his right hand, which grasped a common pocket-knife, was the work of an instant, and the landlady of the house--for he had mistaken his object--fell with a dead weight under the blow. At the same instant the fingers of his right hand became fast bound, and the blood ran down his arm in a bubbling stream. Instead of doing the murder he intended, the knife blade had struck backwards, and closed tightly upon the holder, so that three of his fingers and the fleshy part of the thumb were gashed through to the bone. Regardless of this, he extricated his hand, cast the knife fiercely amongst the combatants, and fell to the attack in right good earnest. Pope, if I recollect aright, very highly extols some of those similes which Perrault describes as similes with a long tail, introduced by the greatest of epic poets into his descriptions of the combats between the Trojans and the Greeks, In humble imitation, then, of Homer, let me proceed to say, that as a platoon of maggots on a cheese-plate contend with violent writhings of the body for superiority, as they overrun each other, and alternately gain the uppermost place, or roll ingloriously to the bottom in the ambitious strife for mastery;--so did the preservers and the destroyers of game in the parlour of the poacher's ken mingle together in deadly strife, amidst the fall of tables and the wreck of kegs.