a half's duration, in which a man whose occasions call
him up so preposterously has to wait for his breakfast.

Oh those headaches at dawn of day, when at five, or half-past five in
summer, and not much later in the dark seasons, we were compelled to
rise, having been perhaps not above four hours in bed--(for we were no
go-to-beds with the lamb, though we anticipated the lark ofttimes in her
rising--we liked a parting up at midnight, as all young men did before
these effeminate times, and to have our friends about us--we were not
constellated under Aquarius, that watery sign, and therefore incapable
of Bacchus, cold washy, bloodless--we were none of your Basilian
water-sponges, nor had taken our degrees at Mount Ague--we were right
toping Capulets, jolly companions, we and they),--but to have to get up,
as we said before, curtailed of half our fair sleep, fasting, with only
a dim vista of refreshing Bohea in the distance--to be necessitated to
rouse ourselves at the detestable rap of an hag of a domestic, who
seemed to take a diabolical pleasure in her announcement that it was
"time to rise"; and whose chappy knuckles we have often yearned to
amputate, and string them up at our chamber-door, to be a terror to all
such unreasonable rest-breakers in future--

"Facil" and sweet, as Virgil sings, had been the "descending" of the
over-night, balmy the first sinking of the heavy head upon the pillow;
but to get up, as he goes on to say--

Revocare gradus, superasque evadere ad auras

--and to get up, moreover, to make jokes with malice prepended--there
was the "labour," there the "work."

No Egyptian taskmaster ever devised a slavery like to that, our slavery.
No fractious operants ever turned out for half the tyranny which this
necessity exercised upon us. Half a dozen jests in a day (bating Sundays
too), why, it seems nothing! We make twice the number every day in our
lives as a matter of course, and claim no Sabbatical exemptions. But
then they come into our head. But when the head has to go out to
them--when the mountain must go to Mahomet--

Reader, try it for once, only for one short twelvemonth.

It was not every week that a fashion of pink stockings came up; but
mostly, instead of it, some rugged, untractable subject; some topic
impossible to be contorted into the risible; some feature, upon which no
smile could play; some flint, from which no process of ingenuity could
procure a distillation. There they lay;