ds. Then I came home, had my usual rest, rose, and set to
work in my business-room, where I drew up an important paper. Still no
appearance of the lady. I had breakfast, read the newspaper, and
played with the children. One of my new friends called, and made an
appointment. Still no appearance of my wife down stairs. At length,
about the middle of the day, when I was deep in a new piece of
business, she peeped in, with a cold nose and fresh ringlets, to ask a
cheque for her house-money--having got down stairs rather more
promptly than usual that morning, in order to go out and settle her
weekly bills. Thus I had a series of waking transactions last night,
another this morning--in fact, _a history_--while she had been lost in
the regions of oblivion. My sleep is rounded by hers, like a small
circle within a large one.'

Sometimes he speculates on the ultimate reckoning of their respective
lives. 'Mine,' says he, 'will have been so thickened up with doings of
all kinds, that it will appear long. I shall seem to have lived all my
days. I fear it must be different with yours. So much of it having
been passed in entire unconsciousness, you will look back from seventy
as most people do from five-and-thirty; and when Death presents his
dart, you will feel like one that has been defrauded of a most
precious privilege. You will go off in a state of impious discontent,
as if you had been shockingly ill-used.' Such is one of his sly plans
for rousing her to a sense of the impropriety of her ways; but all
such quips and cranks are in vain. Only don't absolutely shake her in
her bed before her thirteenth hour of rest, and you may _say_ what you
please. It cannot be implied that she is hardened, for no such quality
is compatible with her character. But she smiles every joke and every
advice aside with such an air of impassible benignity, that you see it
is of no use to think of reforming her in this grand particular.

One day not long since it rather seemed as if she was going to turn
the tables on her worthy spouse. She had a remarkable dream, in which
she thought she heard a lady sing a new song. When she awoke, she
remembered the two verses she thought she had heard, and they turned
out to be perfectly good sense and good metre, and not intolerable as
poetry. Now this was what Coleridge calls a psychological curiosity,
for the verses had of course been composed by her in her sleep. There
was more in the matter still. In her wakin