The sufferer was fast approaching dissolution--dragged almost to the verge of that awful chasm he trembled to contemplate, from which no agony of prayers or tears could save him.

Nothing could comfort him now; Hattersley's rough attempts at consolation were utterly in vain.

The world was nothing to him: life and all its interests, its petty cares and transient pleasures, were a cruel mockery.

To talk of the past was to torture him with vain remorse; to refer to the future was to increase his anguish; and yet to be silent was to leave him a prey to his own regrets and apprehensions.

Often he dwelt with shuddering minuteness on the fate of his perishing clay--the slow, piecemeal dissolution already invading his frame: the shroud, the coffin, the dark, lonely grave, and all the horrors of corruption.
'If I try,' said his afflicted wife, 'to divert him from these things--to raise his thoughts to higher themes, it is no better:--"Worse and worse!" he groans.