It was a deep, dreamless sleep. Jack did not like it, and would crouch down beside him, watching him with sad eyes, like a friend at a sick man’s bedside. Poor beast, he could make nothing of this new state of affairs. Some change he could not comprehend had come over his chum and laid him low. He seemed to be mutely questioning him, asking him why he never nowadays trotted about behind the scenes. But it was all Murph could do to see his little anxious, sorrowful face; he could only view him as if through a fog, an indistinct shape of sympathy hardly distinguishable from surrounding objects. Nevertheless, he still tried hard to make out in the dusk of his blindness his kindly comrade of yore; he would raise his palsied head, and from the depths of his dim eyes, veiled by a milky film, dart a pale look of infinite gentleness. Sometimes the two bushy tufts on his forehead dropped right over his eyes and further confused his vision. But Jack would put them back lightly with the tips of his delicate fingers. Indeed he never left his side, tickling his ears to amuse him, tapping and stroking him, ever on the watch, a tender-hearted nurse of inexhaustible care and foresight. This lowly being had learnt to love like a mother; his little dim soul had emerged from its darkness to answer his dying comrade’s need, and now, shining bright in the light of day, was working deeds of charity. XII One evening the show pitched on the outskirts of a big town. The booth was raised, the trestles fixed, the boards laid, and the costume-chests emptied of their miscellaneous finery. Murph lay curled up by himself behind the stove; all round him reigned a deafening uproar, a rush and scurry of feet, a perfect hurricane of noise. The master was shouting and scolding; the Jack-pudding with his hoarse voice was yelping like a dog, mewing like a cat, crowing like a cock, getting into trim for the patter-speech with which to tickle the ears of the groundlings, while the general hands were bustling about, nailing and hammering, stimulated by copious libations of wine. The monkeys, too, bore their part; hearing all this uproar, they joined in with a will. Their shrill scolding rose above the hammering, and they chattered incessantly and shook the bars of their cages. The dogs barked, a solemn-faced parrot repeated a bad word over and over again, while the musicians hired for the evening performance drew lugubrious notes from their instruments by way of keeping their hand in. Hurrah! the stage was set up at last.