E MANAGEMENT OF A SICK CHAMBER

Mr Mould was surrounded by his household gods. He was enjoying the
sweets of domestic repose, and gazing on them with a calm delight. The
day being sultry, and the window open, the legs of Mr Mould were on the
window-seat, and his back reclined against the shutter. Over his shining
head a handkerchief was drawn, to guard his baldness from the flies. The
room was fragrant with the smell of punch, a tumbler of which grateful
compound stood upon a small round table, convenient to the hand of
Mr Mould; so deftly mixed that as his eye looked down into the cool
transparent drink, another eye, peering brightly from behind the crisp
lemon-peel, looked up at him, and twinkled like a star.

Deep in the City, and within the ward of Cheap, stood Mr Mould's
establishment. His Harem, or, in other words, the common sitting room
of Mrs Mould and family, was at the back, over the little counting-house
behind the shop; abutting on a churchyard small and shady. In this
domestic chamber Mr Mould now sat; gazing, a placid man, upon his punch
and home. If, for a moment at a time, he sought a wider prospect, whence
he might return with freshened zest to these enjoyments, his moist
glance wandered like a sunbeam through a rural screen of scarlet
runners, trained on strings before the window, and he looked down, with
an artist's eye, upon the graves.

The partner of his life, and daughters twain, were Mr Mould's
companions. Plump as any partridge was each Miss Mould, and Mrs M.
was plumper than the two together. So round and chubby were their fair
proportions, that they might have been the bodies once belonging to the
angels' faces in the shop below, grown up, with other heads attached
to make them mortal. Even their peachy cheeks were puffed out and
distended, as though they ought of right to be performing on celestial
trumpets. The bodiless cherubs in the shop, who were depicted as
constantly blowing those instruments for ever and ever without any
lungs, played, it is to be presumed, entirely by ear.

Mr Mould looked lovingly at Mrs Mould, who sat hard by, and was a
helpmate to him in his punch as in all other things. Each seraph
daughter, too, enjoyed her share of his regards, and smiled upon him in
return. So bountiful were Mr Mould's possessions, and so large his
stock in trade, that even there, within his household sanctuary, stood
a cumbrous press, whose mahogany maw was filled with shrouds, and
wind