weakness, though confinement and hard

fare no doubt had their part in it. Its deplorable peculiarity was,

that it was the faintness of solitude and disuse. It was like the last

feeble echo of a sound made long and long ago. So entirely had it

lost the life and resonance of the human voice, that it affected the

senses like a once beautiful colour faded away into a poor weak

stain. So sunken and suppressed it was, that it was like a voice

underground. So expressive it was, of a hopeless and lost creature,

that a famished traveller, wearied out by lonely wandering in a

wilderness, would have remembered home and friends in such a

tone before lying down to die.

Some minutes of silent work had passed: and the haggard eyes

had looked up again: not with any interest or curiosity, but with a

dull mechanical perception, beforehand, that the spot where the

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

only visitor they were aware of had stood, was not yet empty.

“I want,” said Defarge, who had not removed his gaze from the

shoemaker, “to let in a little more light here. You can bear a little

more?”

The shoemaker stopped his work; looked with a vacant air of

listening, at the floor on one side of him; then similarly, at the floor

on the other side of him; then, upward at the speaker.

“What did you say?”

“You can bear a little more light?”