to do us honour!--the thought of so
extraordinary a paternity quite overcame him; and slipping away under
some pretence from the bride and her motley adherents, poor Merry
took horse from the back yard to the nearest sea-coast, from which,
shipping himself to America, he shortly after consoled himself with a
more congenial match in the person of Miss Brunton; relieved from his
intended clown father, and a bevy of painted Buffas for bridemaids.

XIV.--THAT WE SHOULD RISE WITH THE LARK

At what precise minute that little airy musician doffs his night
gear, and prepares to tune up his unseasonable matins, we are not
naturalists enough to determine. But for a mere human gentleman--that
has no orchestra business to call him from his warm bed to such
preposterous exercises--We take ten, or half after ten (eleven, of
course, during this Christmas solstice), to be the very earliest hour,
at which he can begin to think of abandoning his pillow. To think of
it, we say; for to do it in earnest, requires another half hour's good
consideration. Not but there are pretty sun-risings, as we are told,
and such like gawds, abroad in the world, in summer time especially,
some hours before what we have assigned; which a gentleman may see,
as they say, only for getting up. But, having been tempted once or
twice, in earlier life, to assist at those ceremonies, we confess
our curiosity abated. We are no longer ambitious of being the sun's
courtiers, to attend at his morning levees. We hold the good hours of
the dawn too sacred to waste them upon such observances; which have
in them, besides, something Pagan and Persic. To say truth, we never
anticipated our usual hour, or got up with the sun (as 'tis called),
to go a journey, or upon a foolish whole day's pleasuring, but we
suffered for it all the long hours after in listlessness and headachs;
Nature herself sufficiently declaring her sense of our presumption,
in aspiring to regulate our frail waking courses by the measures of
that celestial and sleepless traveller. We deny not that there is
something sprightly and vigorous, at the outset especially, in these
break-of-day excursions. It is flattering to get the start of a lazy
world; to conquer death by proxy in his image. But the seeds of sleep
and mortality are in us; and we pay usually in strange qualms, before
night falls, the penalty of the unnatural inversion. Therefore, while
the busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their cloth