Then she got up, and bestirred herself for the men, hoping, no doubt, they would intermit their drumming if she could but conciliate them.

But as soon as one relay ceased drumming another took it up; and thus, shameful to relate, they continued the whole night without intermission, crowding round my uncle's bed, making his room intolerably hot and close, and pushing in and out of the room and up and down the stairs.
My uncle now lay in a kind of torpor; the expression of his face painful to witness; his wan hands lying outside the counterpane, and now and then slightly moving, which showed me he still lived.

Towards daybreak I was so worn out that I dropped asleep as I sat beside him with my face on the edge of his pillow--such deep sleep that I neither heard nor dreamed of the drumming.

When I woke, with a strangely confused, unrefreshed feeling, the daylight was faintly making its way into the room, which had no one in it but my uncle, my aunt, and me.

She seemed to have crawled with difficulty to the foot of his bed, and there sunk and fallen asleep I went out on the landing--candles were burning in their sockets with a vile smell--the house was full of vile smells and of confusion and disorder--the house-door stood ajar--one or two dragoons lay sleeping heavily on the ground.