But it did not wake, and Mr.Fogg went down stairs with a horrible dread upon him, and assuming his hat prepared to go to the office.

Mrs.Fogg called to him, "Don't slam the front door and wake the baby!" And then Mr.Fogg did slam it with extraordinary violence; after which he walked up the street with gloom in his soul and a wretched feeling of apprehension that the baby would never waken.
"What on earth would we do if it should stay asleep for years?
S'pose'n it should sleep right straight ahead for half a century, and grow to be an old man without knowing its pa and ma, and without ever learning anything or seeing anything!" The thought maddened him.

He remembered Rip Van Winkle; he recalled the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus; he thought of the afflicted woman whom he saw once at a menagerie in a trance, in which she had been for twenty years continuously, excepting when she awoke for a few moments at long intervals to ask for something to eat.

Perhaps when he and Mrs.Fogg were dead the baby might be rented to a menagerie, and be carried around the country as a spectacle.

The idea haunted him.