or.

His wife unbarred the door in fear and haste. Her hunchbacked sister
stood by the hearth, staring toward the threshold. The children
cowered behind.

Tom Chuff entered with his cudgel in his hand, without speaking, and
threw himself into a chair opposite the fire. He had been away two or
three days. He looked haggard, and his eyes were bloodshot. They knew
he had been drinking.

Tom raked and knocked the peat fire with his stick, and thrust his
feet close to it. He signed towards the little dresser, and nodded to
his wife, and she knew he wanted a cup, which in silence she gave him.
He pulled a bottle of gin from his 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 tha