t me not be hard
upon my child. Beside her sister Cherry she appears so. A strange noise
that, Mr Jonas!'

'Something wrong in the clock, I suppose,' said Jonas, glancing towards
it. 'So the other one ain't your favourite, ain't she?'

The fond father was about to reply, and had already summoned into his
face a look of most intense sensibility, when the sound he had already
noticed was repeated.

'Upon my word, Mr Jonas, that is a very extraordinary clock,' said
Pecksniff.

It would have been, if it had made the noise which startled them; but
another kind of time-piece was fast running down, and from that the
sound proceeded. A scream from Chuffey, rendered a hundred times more
loud and formidable by his silent habits, made the house ring from roof
to cellar; and, looking round, they saw Anthony Chuzzlewit extended on
the floor, with the old clerk upon his knees beside him.

He had fallen from his chair in a fit, and lay there, battling for each
gasp of breath, with every shrivelled vein and sinew starting in its
place, as if it were bent on bearing witness to his age, and sternly
pleading with Nature against his recovery. It was frightful to see how
the principle of life, shut up within his withered frame, fought like a
strong devil, mad to be released, and rent its ancient prison-house.
A young man in the fullness of his vigour, struggling with so much
strength of desperation, would have been a dismal sight; but an old,
old, shrunken body, endowed with preternatural might, and giving the lie
in every motion of its every limb and joint to its enfeebled aspect, was
a hideous spectacle indeed.

They raised him up, and fetched a surgeon with all haste, who bled the
patient and applied some remedies; but the fits held him so long that
it was past midnight when they got him--quiet now, but quite unconscious
and exhausted--into bed.

'Don't go,' said Jonas, putting his ashy lips to Mr Pecksniff's ear and
whispered across the bed. 'It was a mercy you were present when he was
taken ill. Some one might have said it was my doing.'

'YOUR doing!' cried Mr Pecksniff.

'I don't know but they might,' he replied, wiping the moisture from his
white face. 'People say such things. How does he look now?'

Mr Pecksniff shook his head.

'I used to joke, you know,' said. Jonas: 'but I--I never wished him
dead. Do you think he's very bad?'

'The doctor said he was. You heard,' was Mr Pecksniff's answer.

'Ah! but he might sa