s, and talks in whispers to her daughter in
the growing darkness, she feels how her own breath drags at the tough
air, and how her throat resents the sting of the large percentage of
sulphur monoxide it contains. The gas-jet is on at the full--or rather
the tap is, for the fish-tail burner doesn't realise its ideal. It
sputters in its lurid nimbus--gets bronchitis on its own account, tries
to cough its tubes clear and fails. Sally and her mother sit on in the
darkness, and talk about it, shirking the coming suffocation of their
old friend, and praying that his sleep may last till the deadly air
lightens, be it ever so little. Sally's animated face shows that she
is on a line of cogitation, and presently it fructifies.

"Suppose every one let their fires out, wouldn't the fog go? It
couldn't go on by itself."

"I don't know, chick. I suppose it's been all thought out by committees
and scientific people. Besides, we should all be frozen."

"Not if we went to bed."

"What! In the daytime?"

"Better do nothing in bed than be choked up."

"I dare say the fog wouldn't go away. You see, it's due to atmospheric
conditions, so they say."

"That's only because nobody's there to stop 'em talking nonsense.
Look at all that smoke going up our chimney." So it was, and a jolly
blaze there was going to be when the three shovelfuls Sally had
enthusiastically heaped on had incubated, and the time was ripe for
the poker.

Had you been there you would have seen in Sally's face as it caught the
firelight-flicker and pondered on the cause of the fog, that _she_ had
not heard a choking fit of the poor old sleeper in the next room. And
in her mother's that she _had_, and all the memory of the dreadful
hours just passed. Her manner, too, was absent as she talked, and she
listened constantly. Sally was to know what it was like soon. The opium
sleep would end.

"Isn't that him?" The mother's sharp ear of apprehension makes her say
this; the daughter has not heard the buried efforts of the lung that
cannot cough. It will succeed directly, if the patient is raised up,
so. Both have gone quickly and quietly into the sick-chamber, and it
is the nurse who speaks. Her prediction is fulfilled, and the silent
struggle of suffocation becomes a tearing convulsion, that means to
last some while and does it. How the old, thin tenement of life can go
on living unkilled is a problem to solve. But it survives this time.
Perhaps the new cough-mixture