‘I _say_,’ cried Mr. Williams, turning very red, ‘what the deuce do you mean by talking to me as if I was left for execution? What have I done? I’ve robbed nobody.’ ‘You have robbed everybody—the whole world!’ exclaimed Mr. Erin excitedly. ‘In burning those papers you burnt the most precious things on earth. A bonfire, you call it! Nero, who fiddled while Rome was burning, was guiltless compared to you. You are a disgrace to humanity. Shakespeare had you in his eye, sir, when he spoke of “a marble-hearted fiend.”’ Mr. Samuel Erin had his favourite bard by heart, and was consequently in no want of ‘base comparisons,’ but he stopped a moment for want of breath. Annoyance and indignation had had the same effect upon Mr. Williams. He had never been ‘bully-ragged’ in his own house for ‘nothing’—except by his wife—before. Purple and speechless, he regarded his antagonist with protruding eyes, a human Etna on the verge of eruption. Mr. John Jervis knew his man. Up to this point he had taken no part in the controversy; but he now seized Mr. Erin by the arm, and led him rapidly downstairs. Their last few steps were accomplished with dangerous velocity, for a flying body struck both of them violently on the back. This was William Henry, who, unable to escape the wild rush of the bull, had described a parabola in the air. ‘If there’s law in England, you shall smart for this,’ roared the infuriated animal over the banisters. ‘Perhaps I ought to have told you that Mr. Williams was of a hasty disposition,’ observed Mr. Jervis apologetically, when they found themselves in the street. ‘Hasty!’ exclaimed Mr. Erin, whose mind was much too occupied with sacrilege to concern himself with assault; ‘a more thoughtless and precipitate idiot never breathed. The idea of his having burnt those precious papers! I suppose, after what has happened, it would be useless to inquire just now whether any scrap of them has escaped the flames; otherwise my son can go back—— ‘ ‘I am sure that wouldn’t do,’ interposed Mr. Jervis confidently. William Henry breathed a sigh of relief. The impressions of Stratford-on-Avon seemed to him indelible; they had left on him such ‘local colouring’ as time itself, he felt, could hardly remove. Fortunately for his _amour propre_, not a word was said by his father of their reception at Clopton House. His whole mind was monopolised by the literary disappointment. The inconvenience that had happened to his son did not weigh with him a feather.