sometimes
their very slave. When driven to it by their lash, every occupation,
which when free we resort to as pastime, becomes taskwork; nor will
these dogged masters suffer us to purchase emancipation with the
proceeds of the toil of our groaning genius. But whenever the worst
comes to the worst, and we almost wish to die so that we might escape
the galling pressure of our chains, we sport buff, and into the
shower-bath. Yet such is the weakness of poor human nature, that like a
criminal on the scaffold, shifting the signal kerchief from hand to
hand, much to the irritation of his excellency the hangman, one of the
most impatient of men--and more to the satisfaction of the crowd, the
most patient of men and women--we often stand shut up in that
sentry-looking canvass box, dexterously and sinistrously fingering the
string, perhaps for five shrinking, and shuddering, and _grueing_
minutes, ere we can summon up desperation to pull down upon ourselves
the rushing waterfall! Soon as the agony is over, we bounce out the
colour of beetroot, and survey ourselves in a five-foot mirror, with an
amazement that, on each successive exhibition, is still as fresh as when
we first experienced it,

"In life's morning march, when our spirits were young."

By-and-by we assume the similitude of an immense boiled lobster that has
leapt out of the pan--and then, seeming for a while to be an
emblematical or symbolical representation of the setting Sun, we sober
down into a faint pink, like that of the Morn, and finally subside into
our own permanent flesh-light, which, as we turn our back upon
ourselves, after the fashion of some of his majesty's ministers, reminds
us of that line in Cowper descriptive of the November Moon--

"Resplendent less, but of an ampler round!"

Like that of the eagle, our youth is renewed--we feel strong as the
horse in Homer--a divine glow permeates our being, as if it were the
subdued spiritual essence of caloric. An intense feeling of self--not
self-love, mind ye, and the farthest state imaginable in this wide world
from selfishness--elevates us far up above the clouds, into the loftiest
regions of the sunny blue, and we seem to breathe an atmosphere, of
which every glorious gulp is inspiration. Despondency is thrown to the
dogs. Despair appears in his true colours, a more grotesque idiot than
Grimaldi, and we treat him with a guffaw. All ante-bath difficulties
seem now--what they really are--facili