Mrs Preddle snuffed the candle again, and made another unpleasant smell of burning, but paid no heed to it, fifty years of practice having accustomed her to that odour--an extremely common one in those days, when in every little town there was a tallow-melter, the fumes of whose works at certain times made themselves pretty well-known for some distance round. The question was repeated by old Gemp at intervals all through the evening--"What was I thinking about when I was took badly?" and Mrs Preddle became irritated by his persistence. But this made no difference whatever to the old man, who scraped his stubbly chin with his finger, and then pointed, to ask again. For the trouble that had been upon his mind when he was stricken hung over him like a dark cloud, and he was always fighting mentally to learn what it all meant. "What was it?--what was it? What was I thinking about?" Over and over and over, and no answer would come. Mrs Preddle went on with her knitting, and ejaculated "Bless the man!" and dropped stitches, and picked them up again, and at last grew so angry, that, upon old Gemp asking her, for about the hundredth time that night, that same wearisome question, she cried out: "Drat the man! how should I know? Look ye here, if you--Oh! I won't stand no more of this nonsense?" She rose and went into the kitchen. "Doctor Luttrell said if he got more restless he was to have it," she grumbled to herself, "and he's quite unbearable to-night!" She poured out a double dose from a bottle left in her charge, and chuckled as she said to herself, "That'll quiet him for the night." Old Gemp was sitting up in bed when she returned to the bed-room; and once more his pointing finger rose, and he was about to speak, when Mrs Preddle interfered. "There, that'll do, my dear! and now you've got to take this here physic directly, to do you good." The old man looked at her in a vacant, helpless way for a few moments, and then his countenance grew angry, and he motioned the medicine aside. "Oh, come now, it's of no use! You've got to take it, so now then!" She pressed the cup towards his lips; but the old man struck at it angrily, and it flew across the room, splashing the bed with the opium-impregnated liquid, and then shattering on the cemented floor. "Well, of all the owd rips as ever I did see!" cried the woman. "Oh, you are better, then!" "What was I thinking about when I was took badly?" cried Gemp, pointing as if nothing had happened. "Oh, about your money in the bank for aught I know!" cried the woman. "Ha!" The old man clapped his hands to his forehead, and held them there for a few minutes, staring straight before him at the bed-room wall. He had uttered that ejaculation so sharply that the woman started, and recoiled from him, in ignorance of the fact that she had touched the key-note that had set the fibres of his memory athrill. "Why, what's come to you?" she said. "Sakes, man, you're not worse?"