to and fro in the
gusts of wind that made easy ingress through many a chink and cranny),
were a looking-glass, sundry appliances of the toilet, a box of coarse
rouge, a few ornaments of more show than value, and a watch, the regular
and calm click of which produced that indescribably painful feeling
which, we fear, many of our readers who have heard the sound in a
sick-chamber can easily recall. A large tester-bed stood opposite to
this table, and the looking-glass partially reflected curtains of
a faded stripe, and ever and anon (as the position of the sufferer
followed the restless emotion of a disordered mind) glimpses of the face
of one on whom Death was rapidly hastening. Beside this bed now stood
Dummie, a small, thin man dressed in a tattered plush jerkin, from
which the rain-drops slowly dripped, and with a thin, yellow, cunning
physiognomy grotesquely hideous in feature, but not positively villanous
in expression. On the other side of the bed stood a little boy of about
three years old, dressed as if belonging to the better classes, although
the garb was somewhat tattered and discoloured. The poor child trembled
violently, and evidently looked with a feeling of relief on the entrance
of Dummie. And now there slowly, and with many a phthisical sigh,
heaved towards the foot of the bed the heavy frame of the woman who had
accosted Dummie below, and had followed him, haud passibus aequis, to
the room of the sufferer; she stood with a bottle of medicine in her
hand, shaking its contents up and down, and with a kindly yet timid
compassion spread over a countenance crimsoned with habitual libations.
This made the scene,--save that on a chair by the bedside lay a
profusion of long, glossy, golden ringlets, which had been cut from
the head of the sufferer when the fever had begun to mount upwards, but
which, with a jealousy that portrayed the darling littleness of a vain
heart, she had seized and insisted on retaining near her; and save that,
by the fire, perfectly inattentive to the event about to take place
within the chamber, and to which we of the biped race attach so awful
an importance, lay a large gray cat, curled in a ball, and dozing
with half-shut eyes, and ears that now and then denoted, by a gentle
inflection, the jar of a louder or nearer sound than usual upon her
lethargic senses. The dying woman did not at first attend to the
entrance either of Dummie or the female at the foot of the bed, but she
turned h