"… [They] would have beaten me, and without any doubt would have finished me off, were it not for my digestive tract. It had cramped up from the pain of all those strokes and blows and was uneasily overflowing with all those raw vegetables, stricken with greasy diarrhea - it shot the fertilizer out in a jet and drove them away from my horsewhipped haunches, some by the spray of this most loathsome of liquids, others by the reek of this most noisome of smells."