The following calculation is interesting. Suppose one boy aged ten years determines to rise at five o’clock all the year round. Another of the same age, indolent and fond of ease, rises at eight, or an average of eight, every morning. If they both live to be seventy years old, the one will have gained over the other, during the intervening period of sixty years, sixty-five thousand seven hundred and forty-five hours, which is equal to two thousand seven hundred and thirty-nine and a third days, or just seven and a half years. If a similar calculation were applied to the whole country, how many millions of years of individual usefulness would it prove to be lost to society!
“God bless the man who first invented sleep!”
So Sancho Panza said, and so say I!
And bless him, also, that he didn’t keep
His great discovery to himself, or try
To make it—as the lucky fellow might—
A close monopoly by “patent right!”
Yes—bless the man who first invented sleep,
(I really can’t avoid the iteration;)
But blast the man, with curses loud and deep,