coat-pocket, and nearly filling the teacup,
drank off the dram at a few gulps.

He usually refreshed himself with  two
or three drams of this kind before beating
the inmates of his house. His three little
children, cowering in a corner, eyed him
from under a table, as Jack did the ogre in
the nursery tale. His wife, Nell, standing
behind a chair, which she was ready to
snatch up to meet the blow of the cudgel,
which might be levelled at her at any
moment, never took her eyes off him; and
hunchbacked Mary showed the whites of a
large pair of eyes, similarly employed, as
she stood against the oaken press, her dark
face hardly distinguishable in the distance
from the brown panel behind it.

Tom Chuff was at his third dram, and had
not yet spoken a word since his entrance,
and the suspense was growing dreadful,
when, on a sudden, he leaned back in his
rude seat, the cudgel slipped from his hand,
a change and a death-like pallor came over
his face.

For a while they all stared on; such was
their fear of him, they dared not speak or
move, lest it should prove to have been but
a doze, and Tom should wake up and
proceed forthwith to gratify his temper and
exercise his cudgel.

In a very little time, however, things
began to look so odd, that they ventured,
his wife and Mary, to exchange glances
full of doubt and wonder. He hung so
much over the side of the chair, that if
it had not been one of cyclopean clumsiness
and weight, he would have borne it
to the floor. A leaden tint was darkening
the pallor of his face. They were becoming
alarmed, and finally braving everything,
his wife timidly said, "Tom!" and then
more sharply repeated it, and finally cried
the appellative loudly, and again and again,
with the terrified accompaniment, "He's
dying—he's dying!" her voice rising to a
scream, as she found that neither it nor her
plucks and shakings of him by the shoulder
had the slightest effect in recalling him
from his torpor.

And now from sheer terror of a new kind
the children added their shrilly piping to
the talk and cries of their seniors; and if
anything could have called Tom up from
his lethargy, it might have been the piercing
chorus that made the rude chamber of the
poacher's habitation ring again. But Tom
continued unmoved, deaf, and stirless.

His wife sent Mary down to the village,
hardly a quarter of a mile away, to implore
of the doctor, for whose family she did
duty as laundress, to come down and look
at her husband, who seemed to be dying.

The doctor, who was a good-natured fellow,
arrived. With his hat still on, he looked
at Tom, examined him, and when he found
that the emetic he had brought with him,
on conjecture from Mary's description, did
not act, and that his lancet brought no
blood, and that he felt a pulseless wrist,
he shook his head, and inwardly thought:

"What the plague is the woman crying
for? Could she have desired a greater,
blessing for her children and herself than
the very thing that has happened?"

Tom, in fact, seemed quite gone. At his
lips no breath was perceptible. The doctor
could discover no pulse. His hands and
feet were cold, and the chill was stealing
up into his body.

The doctor, after a stay of twenty minutes,
had buttoned up his great-coat again and
pulled down his hat, and told Mrs. Chuff
that there was no use in his remaining
there any longer, when, all of a sudden, a
little rill of blood began to trickle from the
lancet-cut in Tom Chuff's temple.

"That's very odd," said the doctor.
"Let us wait a little."

I must describe now the sensations which
Tom Chuff had experienced.

With his elbows on his knees, and his
chin upon his hands, he was staring into
the embers, with his gin beside him, when
suddenly a swimming came in his head, he
lost sight of the fire, and a sound like one
stroke of a loud church bell smote his
brain.

Then he heard a confused humming, and
the leaden weight of his head held him
backward as he sank in his chair, and
consciousness quite forsook him.

When he came to himself he felt chilled,
and was leaning against a huge leafless tree.
The night was moonless, and when he
looked up he thought he had never seen
stars so large and bright, or sky so black.
The stars, too, seemed to blink down with
longer intervals of darkness, and fiercer
and more dazzling emergence, and something,
he vaguely thought, of the character
of silent menace and fury.

He had a confused recollection of having
come there, or rather of having been carried
along, as if on men's shoulders, with a sort
of rushing motion. But it was utterly
indistinct; the imperfect recollection simply
of a sensation. He had seen or heard
nothing on his way.

He looked round. There was not a sign