his hand and looked upon the mutilated leg, from which about a pound of
muscle was detached. 'Yes, I have destroyed a genuine antique; I may be
in for thousands!' And then there sprung up in his bosom a sort of angry
hope. 'Let me see,' he thought. 'Julia's got rid of--, there's nothing
to connect me with that beast Forsyth; the men were all drunk, and
(what's better) they've been all discharged. O, come, I think this is
another case of moral courage! I'll deny all knowledge of the thing.'

A moment more, and he stood again before the Hercules, his lips sternly
compressed, the coal-axe and the meat-cleaver under his arm. The next,
he had fallen upon the packing-case. This had been already seriously
undermined by the operations of Gideon; a few well-directed blows, and
it already quaked and gaped; yet a few more, and it fell about Morris in
a shower of boards followed by an avalanche of straw.

And now the leather-merchant could behold the nature of his task: and at
the first sight his spirit quailed. It was, indeed, no more ambitious a
task for De Lesseps, with all his men and horses, to attack the hills
of Panama, than for a single, slim young gentleman, with no previous
experience of labour in a quarry, to measure himself against that
bloated monster on his pedestal. And yet the pair were well encountered:
on the one side, bulk--on the other, genuine heroic fire.

'Down you shall come, you great big, ugly brute!' cried Morris aloud,
with something of that passion which swept the Parisian mob against the
walls of the Bastille. 'Down you shall come, this night. I'll have none
of you in my lobby.'

The face, from its indecent expression, had particularly animated the
zeal of our iconoclast; and it was against the face that he began his