The only one of the family who could not rest was little Jock. Who does not remember that sleeplessness of childhood which is more desolate and more restless in its contradiction of nature, and innocent vacancy than even the maturer misery of wakeful nights all rustling full of care and thought? Jock had been waked out of his first sleep by the muffled coming and going, the sound of subdued steps and whispering voices. He had heard a great deal which “the family” are never supposed to hear. He heard the doctor’s whispered conference with the Fords in the passage. “I can say nothing with certainty,” the doctor had said; “if he can sleep he may be himself in the morning, and able to attend to his business.” “Or he may pass away,” Mr. Ford had said; “at the dawning. That is the time when they get their release.” Pass away! Jock wondered, with a shiver, what it meant. Visions flitted before his eyes of his father’s figure, like that of Time, which he had seen on an old almanac, his gray locks flying behind him, and a long staff in his hand. Where would he go to in the dark, or at the dawning? Jock tried to turn his face to the wall, away from the long mysterious window, which attracted his gaze in spite of himself, and through which he almost expected to see some weird passenger step forth. His door was open, as he liked to have it, and the faint light shining through it usually afforded him a little consolation; but on this particular night, among his vague horrors, this too became a dangerous opening, through which some terrible figure might suddenly appear. He was obliged to turn round again, to keep both door and window within sight. And all kinds of visions flitted before him. The noise of a wagon far off on the road, across the common, suggested the dead-cart of the Plague, rolling heavily, stopping here and there to take up its horrible load. He seemed to hear the bell tinkle, the heavy tramp of the attendants; and at any moment the child felt the door might be pushed open, and some one come to take him away, and toss him among all those confused limbs and dead faces. Or was it his father whom they would seize as he “passed away,” with his gray hair blown about by the winds. Then Jock’s imagination changed the theme, and he was in the valley of death with Christian, hearing all those horrible whispers on every side, and looking into the mouth of hell. He did everything he could to get to sleep; he counted, as far as his knowledge of numbers would go, and said to himself all the poetry he knew; but all was of no avail. When he began to see the walls of his little room grow more distinct round him in a faint blueness, Jock was not encouraged by the prospect of day-break. He thought of what Mr. Ford had said, and of the people who were “released” at the dawning, and he could not bear it any longer; he sprung from his bed, and rushed toward the light in the passage, a light which was more cheerful, more reassuring, than the pale beginning of the day. The door of his father’s room was ajar, and the light was burning within, and a faint glimmer as of firelight. Jock crept in, trembling and shivering, in his little white night-gown, like an incarnation of the white, cold, tremulous, infantile day.