hard, and no amount of over-night determination makes it easier. I say
to myself, after having wasted the whole evening, "Well, I won't do
any more work to-night; I'll get up early to-morrow morning;" and I am
thoroughly resolved to do so--then. In the morning, however, I feel less
enthusiastic about the idea, and reflect that it would have been much
better if I had stopped up last night. And then there is the trouble of
dressing, and the more one thinks about that the more one wants to put
it off.

It is a strange thing this bed, this mimic grave, where we stretch our
tired limbs and sink away so quietly into the silence and rest. "O bed,
O bed, delicious bed, that heaven on earth to the weary head," as sang
poor Hood, you are a kind old nurse to us fretful boys and girls. Clever
and foolish, naughty and good, you take us all in your motherly lap and
hush our wayward crying. The strong man full of care--the sick man
full of pain--the little maiden sobbing for her faithless lover--like
children we lay our aching heads on your white bosom, and you gently
soothe us off to by-by.

Our trouble is sore indeed when you turn away and will not comfort us.
How long the dawn seems coming when we cannot sleep! Oh! those hideous
nights when we toss and turn in fever and pain, when we lie, like living
men among the dead, staring out into the dark hours that drift so slowly
between us and the light. And oh! those still more hideous nights when
we sit by another in pain, when the low fire startles us every now and
then with a falling cinder, and the tick of the clock seems a hammer
beating out the life that we are watching.

But enough of beds and bedrooms. I have kept to them too long, even for
an idle fellow. Let us come out and have a smoke. That wastes time just
as well and does not look so bad. Tobacco has been a blessing to us
idlers. What the civil-service clerk before Sir Walter's time found
to occupy their minds with it is hard to imagine. I attribute the
quarrelsome nature of the Middle Ages young men entirely to the want of
the soothing weed. They had no work to do and could not smoke, and
the consequence was they were forever fighting and rowing. If, by any
extraordinary chance, there was no war going, then they got up a deadly
family feud with the next-door neighbor, and if, in spite of this, they
still had a few spare moments on their hands, they occupied them with
discussions as to whose sweetheart was the best lookin