“Well, I tell’y, when old Nanny Gilbert seed that, her was as mad as Parson Hawker during a wreck. She ups off her chair and runs first to the pot and looks what’s done there; and then she flies to Bill Martin—Long Bill, yu know—and ketches him by the ear and drags him forward to the pot and sez, flaming like a bit of fuzz, ‘Yer let the devil loose out of your own breast and sent ’um flittering up my chimley, the wiper! and he’s smutted all my supper, as was biling for me and my old man and the childer. And I’ll tell’y what, if yu don’t bring your devil down by his tail, that I may rub his nose in it, I’ll dip yours, I will.’ “Well, yu may believe me, Bill tremmled as a blank-mange—that’s a sort of jelly stuff I seed one day in a gentleman’s house to Bude, when the servant was carrying it in to dinner; it shooked all hover like. For I tell’y, a woman as has had her biling of cabbage and turnips spoiled, especial if there be a taste of bacon in it, ain’t to be preached peaceable. “After that I can’t tell’y ’xactly what took place. We wimin set up screaming and scuffled about like bats in the light. But I seed Nanny giving Long Bill a sort of a chuck with one hand where his coat-tails would have grown, only he didn’t wear a coat, only a jacket. P’raps, though, yu know, he’d nibbled ’em off like the monkey as Parson Davies keeped in the stable for his childer. That monkey had the beautifullest tail—after a peacock—when first he came to Kilkhampton; but he bit it off in little portions. And then, poor thing, at last he got himself into a sort of tangle or slip-knot in twisting himself about to bite right off the last fag-end of stump. And when Ezekiel—that’s the groom—comed in of the morning with his bread and milk, the poor beast stretched his head out with a jerk to get his meat and forgot he had knotted himself up with his own body, and so got strangled in himself. Well, but I was telling yu about Bill Martin and not Parson Davies’s monkey. So after that meetin’ his nose was a queer sort of mixture of scald-red and black. He was never very partial to water, was Bill: and so the scald and smut stuck there, maybe one year, maybe two. But all this happened so long ago that I couldn’t take my Bible oath that it wasn’t more—say three, then: odd numbers is lucky.” Mr. Hawker had a story of a Wellcombe woman whom he visited after the loss of her husband. “Ah! thank the Lord,” said she, “my old man is safe in Beelzebub’s bosom.” “Abraham’s bosom, my good woman,” said the vicar. “Ah! I dare say. I am not acquainted with the quality, and so don’t rightly know their names.” While on the subject of the Devil, I cannot omit a story told of a certain close-fisted Cornish man, whom we will call Mr. Pengelly, as he is still alive. The story lost nothing in the vicar’s mouth. Mr. Pengelly was very ill and like to die. So one night the Devil came to the side of his bed, and said to him: “Mr. Pengelly, I will trouble yu, if you please.”