ight
without rising, by means of a speaking-tube.

John--he chanced to bear my own name--had been so long subject to night
alarms, partly from cats careering in the back yard, and his mistress
demanding to know, through the tube, if he heard them; partly, also,
from frequent ringing of the night-bell, by persons who urgently wanted
"Dr McTougall," that he had become callous in his nervous system, and
did much of his night-work as a semi-somnambulist.

The rooms on the first floor above, consisting of the dining-room,
library, and consulting-room, etcetera, were left, as usual, tenantless
and dark at night. On the drawing-room floor Mrs McTougall lay in her
comfortable bed, sound asleep and dreamless. The poor lady had spent
the first part of that night in considerable fear because of the
restlessness of Dumps in his new and strange bedroom--her husband being
absent because of a sudden call to a country patient. The speaking-tube
had been pretty well worked, and John had been lively in consequence--
though patient--but at last the drowsy god had calmed the good lady into
a state of oblivion.

On the floor above, besides various bedrooms, there were the night
nursery and the schoolroom. In one of the bedrooms slumbered the young
lady who had robbed me of my doggie!

In the nursery were four cribs and a cradle. Dr McTougall's family had
come in what I may style annual progression. Six years had he been
married, and each year had contributed another annual to the army.

The children were now ranged round the walls with mathematical
precision--one, two, three, four, and five. The doctor liked them all
to be together, and the nursery, being unusually large, permitted of
this arrangement. A tall, powerful, sunny-tempered woman of uncertain
age officered the army by day and guarded it by night. Jack and Harry
and Job and Jenny occupied the cribs, Dolly the cradle. Each of these
creatures had been transfixed by sleep in the very midst of some
desperate enterprise during the earlier watches of that night, and all
had fallen down in more or less _degage_ and reckless attitudes. Here a
fat fist, doubled; there a fatter leg, protruded; elsewhere a spread
eagle was represented, with the bedclothes in a heap on its stomach; or
a complex knot was displayed, made up of legs, sheets, blankets, and
arms. Subsequently the tall but faithful guardian had gone round,
disentangled the knot, reduced the spread eagle, and straig