into slumber with its insidious croon. Mr. Hearn, with
strange obtuseness to the enormity of the thing, blandly remarks: "For
thousands of early risers too poor to own a clock, the cessation of its
song is the signal to get up." I devoutly trust that none of the West
India islands furnishing such satanic entomological specimens will
ever be annexed to the United States. Some of our extreme advocates of
territorial expansion might spend a profitable few weeks on one of those
favored isles. A brief association with that _cabritt-bois_ would be
likely to cool the enthusiasm of the most ardent imperialist.

An incalculable amount of specious sentiment has been lavished upon
daybreak, chiefly by poets who breakfasted, when they did breakfast, at
mid-day. It is charitably to be said that their practice was better than
their precept--or their poetry. Thomson, the author of "The Castle of
Indolence," who gave birth to the depraved apostrophe,

"Falsely luxurious, will not man awake,"

was one of the laziest men of his century. He customarily lay in bed
until noon meditating pentameters on sunrise. This creature used to be
seen in his garden of an afternoon, with both hands in his waistcoat
pockets, eating peaches from a pendent bough. Nearly all the English
poets who at that epoch celebrated what they called "the effulgent orb
of day" were denizens of London, where pure sunshine is unknown eleven
months out of the twelve.

In a great city there are few incentives to early rising. What charm is
there in roof-tops and chimney-stacks to induce one to escape even
from a nightmare? What is more depressing than a city street before the
shop-windows have lifted an eyelid, when "the very houses seem asleep,"
as Wordsworth says, and nobody is astir but the belated burglar or the
milk-and-water man or Mary washing off the front steps? Daybreak at
the seaside or up among the mountains is sometimes worth while, though
familiarity with it breeds indifference. The man forced by restlessness
or occupation to drink the first vintage of the morning every day of
his life has no right appreciation of the beverage, however much he may
profess to relish it. It is only your habitual late riser who takes in
the full flavor of Nature at those rare intervals when he gets up to
go a-fishing. He brings virginal emotions and unsatiated eyes to the
sparkling freshness of earth and stream and sky. For him--a momentary
Adam--the world is newly created. It