t 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 any longer, when, all of a sudden, a
little rill of blood began to trickle from the lancet-cut in Tom
Chuffs 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 mor