saith the tuneful proverb, and I’ll pass inoffensively if I can. Ay, i’faith, I may well say _if I can_, for if my eyes are worth a turnip, yonder is an outpost stretched before that sty. No, I’m wrong, it is a young pig--worthy little fellow, would I had the craft of Circe to change every cur in the land into your similitude! A grunt before a snarl, a snore before a snap any day. But what am I gabbling about?--there is evil at hand indeed, for yonder is a lurching devil squatted behind that stone, and no mistake. But softly: he seems asleep, and I may perchance steal past unnoticed--about as probable, my present experience assures me, as that you could ring my well-bred friend Piggie without an acknowledgment--he is sole sentry, and if I can but bilk him, I’ll do. Vain hope--he is waking, he is giving a preparatory stretch to his limbs and to his jaws, and, miserable sinner that I am! I’m in for it. But there is yet a single chance--I’ll try the magic of the human eye: there is wonder-working majesty, they say, in it. Did I not myself see Van Amburgh’s brutes blench before it?--am not I too a man?--ay, and I’ll let them see it. Whereupon, with the most astounding corrugation of my brows I could accomplish, I fixed my grim regards upon the cur, expecting to see him sneak in awe away as I drew nigh. But, alas! for the majesty of man, in a pinch like this let me tell him it is but a sorry safeguard--the veriest whelp in the land will bandy surly looks, and haply something worse, in its despite: a cudgel or a “hardy,” I now say, on such an emergency, before the most confounding countenance that ever frowned beneath a diadem. The foe, then, recking but little my display of the tremendous, gave a fierce alarm, while in the vehemence of his wrath he described three circles, his hind legs being the centre, which brought the whole posse of aids and abettors fast and furious into view. And now commenced the fray in earnest: beleaguered on every side, my blood, not to speak boastfully, rose with the great occasion: my tongue gave vigorous utterance to my fury, and my cane swept gallantly from right to left and from left to right, though from the wariness with which, ’mid all their fuss and clamour, the war was waged by my assailants, it was but seldom that a shrill yelp piercing through the din announced its collision with flesh and blood. Never was man more thoroughly put to it. As I made a dash forward upon one, my unprotected rear was promptly invested by another: my only security lay in the rapidity of my evolutions, and considering I am a man five feet five in height and fifteen stone in weight, I fairly take credit to myself for performances in this line, which poor Joe Grimaldi himself were he alive could not eclipse. But a man’s sinews are not of steel, nor are his lungs as tough as a pair of bellows, and under my extraordinary exertions I speedily began to think of vacating a field whereon nothing