"Hampered although he was, he battled it out fiercely--ay, heroically--
as six of our best hounds maimed for life, and one slain outright,
testified.
"Heavens! how the fat man scrambled across the fence! he reached the
spot, and, far too much excited to reload his piece and quietly blow out
the fierce brute's brains, fell to belaboring him about the head with
his gun-stock, shouting the while and yelling; so that the din of his
tongue, mixed with the snarls and long howls of the mangled savage, and
the fierce baying of the dogs, fairly alarmed me, as I said before, at a
mile's distance.
"As it chanced, Timothy was on the road close by, with Peacock; I caught
sight of him, mounted, and spurred on fiercely to the rescue; but when I
reached the hill's brow, all was over. Tom, puffing and panting like a
grampus in shoal water, covered--garments and face and hands--with
lupine gore, had finished his huge enemy, after he had destroyed his
gun, with what he called a stick, but what you and I, Frank, should term
a fair-sized tree; and with his foot upon the brindled monster's neck
was quaffing copious rapture from the neck of a quart bottle--once full,
but now well nigh exhausted--of his appropriate and cherished beverage.
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