But he was too feeble, panting and wheezing continually from the exertion and pausing to rest off strokes between strokes.

Yet was this half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying heartlessness; --yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old, crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now and then with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have served to pass the time during the midnight watch on the bearded forecastle of Noah's ark.

The mother writhed in uneasy slumber, her chest wheezing as if she were in the agonies of strangulation.