rs were more, sometimes they were less, but always
my energy was apt to slacken with the slackening of the day. I never
found inspiration in the midnight oil and oceans of coffee. I have
always wanted my solid eight hours of sleep, and would not shrink from
nine or ten if they fitted in with a worker's life. Youth often gave me
the courage I have not now to take up work again--a promised article,
necessary reading, making notes, copying--at night. But youth never
induced me to rely upon this night work if I could help it. My nearest
approach to a rule was that at the end of the day I was at liberty to
play, that my nights at least could be free of work.

The play to many might pass for a mild form of mild amusement, for it
usually consisted in nothing more riotous than meeting my friends and
talking with them. But I confess that the talk and the quality of it,
the meeting and its informality did strike me as so singularly
stimulating as to verge upon the riotous. The manner of playing was
entirely new to me in the beginning. All conventions bind with a heavy
chain, but none with a heavier than the Philadelphia variety. Spruce
Street nights had never been so free and so vociferous and so late, and,
being a good Philadelphian, I am not sure if the nights that succeeded
have yet lost for me their novelty. As a consequence, if, in looking
back, my days appear to be wholly monopolized by work, my nights seem
consecrated as wholly to amusement. The poet's "hideous" is the last
adjective I could apply to the night my busy day sank into.

How I worked may concern nobody save myself, but how I played I cannot
help hoping has a wider interest. Those old nights were typical of a
period, and they threw me with many people, contemporaries of J.'s and
mine, who did much to make that period what it was. The nights as gay,
as stimulating, that I have spent in other people's houses I have not
the courage to recall except in the utmost privacy. Pepys and N.P.
Willis in their time, no less than a whole army of Pamelas and
Priscillas in ours, have shown the lengths and indiscretions to which so
intimate a breach of hospitality may lead. I have had my experience. For
some years a house with closely curtained windows has reproached me
daily for not understanding that the man who invites the world to stare
at him and is not happy if it won't, objects when his neighbours say
lightly what they see. I am every bit as afraid to speak openly of
t