My uncle now lay in a kind of torpor; the expression of his face painful
to witness; his wan hands lying outside the counterpane, and now and
then slightly moving, which showed me he still lived. Towards daybreak
I was so worn out that I dropped asleep as I sat beside him with my
face on the edge of his pillow--such deep sleep that I neither heard
nor dreamed of the drumming. When I woke, with a strangely confused,
unrefreshed feeling, the daylight was faintly making its way into the
room, which had no one in it but my uncle, my aunt, and me. She seemed
to have crawled with difficulty to the foot of his bed, and there sunk
and fallen asleep I went out on the landing--candles were burning in
their sockets with a vile smell--the house was full of vile smells
and of confusion and disorder--the house-door stood ajar--one or two
dragoons lay sleeping heavily on the ground. I went up again to tell
my aunt, and found her straightening my uncle like a corpse. At the
same moment a dragoon came up behind me. He was going to recommence the
disturbance, when I pointed to the bed, and said, sternly, "See what you
have done. You may now go away satisfied with having made this lately
peaceful family completely wretched. God grant you forgiveness ere you
are laid out like those cold remains."

The dragoon looked confounded. He muttered something, turned on his
heel, said something to his companions below, and we presently saw them
run out of the house. I went and shut the door. On returning I saw my
uncle was not dead. Their thinking him so was a mercy, since it gave
him a little respite. He was too weak to be moved, but he begged me to
return home and tell what had happened to my parents: adding, as I left
him, "Do not make the affair worse than it is." I thought it would be
difficult to do that.