The expedient was this: He told her, with a big oath, and a face at which the walls of St Sebastian might have trembled to their foundations, that, the first time he found her intoxicated, he would put her in a coffin, and actually bury her in the earth, as deep and sure as ever Jonah was buried in the belly of the biggest monster of the deep. Nor was the threat a sheer gust of breath, for he immediately set about making a real coffin—a performance which he executed very well, painting it as black as fashion requires, and studding it with a goodly portion of white buttons, which he tore from a mass of old regimentals; and, having finished it, he placed it in his bedroom, as a grim indication of the reality of his intentions. But the woman who could defy the terrors of such a face as that of Gustavus M’Iver, had nothing to fear from the sight of a coffin; and so, of a surety, it turned out—for the determined baggage not only laughed broad in his countenance, but told him to it, that, so long as he was cowardly enough to have any fear of the gallows, she had not a jot of reason to be afraid of being buried alive. Both parties, in this way, seemed equally determined. Gustavus took his usual mighty strides along the room, and set the pulleys of his facial muscles in rapid play; and Julia, the pert minx, indulged in her laughing mockery, that seemed to set him and his coffin at defiance. That she was as serious as Socrates in her disbelief of his intentions, was very soon made manifest—for the coffin had not been three days old, when she got as drunk as Midas; and that he was apparently as determined as Draed, he very soon gave suitable demonstrations—for, in place of lifting her into bed according to his usual practice, he placed her into the grim chest, and, putting a mattock on the top of it, he hoisted it on his shoulders, and strode away forth to a wood as dark as the recesses of the Cumæan witch, that stood at some distance from his habitation. There, as good fortune would have it, he found, already dug to his hand, a deep hole, round the edges of which grew a profusion of bushes and furze, sufficient to make the pit as grim and frightful as the very grave itself; and there, having deposited his charge, with plenty of room for breath through the holes he had made in the lid, he turned him round, and stalked away home to cook his dinner. CHAPTER VII. JULIA GETS INTO A PLEASANT PANDEMONIUM.