"Don't slam the front door and wake the baby!"

And then Mr. Fogg did slam it with extraordinary violence; after which
he walked up the street with gloom in his soul and a wretched feeling
of apprehension that the baby would never waken.

"What on earth would we do if it should stay asleep for years?
S'pose'n it should sleep right straight ahead for half a century, and
grow to be an old man without knowing its pa and ma, and without ever
learning anything or seeing anything!"

The thought maddened him. He remembered Rip Van Winkle; he recalled
the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus; he thought of the afflicted woman whom
he saw once at a menagerie in a trance, in which she had been for
twenty years continuously, excepting when she awoke for a few moments
at long intervals to ask for something to eat. Perhaps when he and
Mrs. Fogg were dead the baby might be rented to a menagerie, and be
carried around the country as a spectacle. The idea haunted him. It
made him miserable. He tried for two or three hours to fix his mind
upon his office-duties, but it was impossible. He determined to
go back to the house to ascertain if the baby had returned to
consciousness. When he got there, Mrs. Fogg was beginning to feel very
uneasy. She said,

"Isn't it strange, Wilberforce, that the baby stays asleep? He is not
awake yet. I suppose it is nervous exhaustion, poor darling! but I am
a little worried about it."

Mr. Fogg felt awfully. He went up and jagged a pin into the baby's
leg quietly, so that his wife could not see him. Still it lay there