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 that neither it nor her plucks and shakings of him by the shoulder had the slightest effect in recalling him from his torpor.

And now from sheer terror of a new kind the children added their shrilly piping to the talk and cries of their seniors; and if anything could have called Tom up from his lethargy, it might have been the piercing chorus that made the rude chamber of the poacher’s habitation ring again.  But Tom continued unmoved, deaf, and stirless.