"Good-night."
"Good-night."
After these exclamations, uttered with piercing distinctness, have been exchanged, the belated revellers from some club or whist-party or an evening at the theatre in town terminate their sweet sorrow at parting by going their several ways to their different homes, where, no doubt, on retiring to rest they sink at once into blameless slumber, ignorant of the fact that for me they have murdered sleep.
I had gone to bed betimes, wornout with hard mental labor: I had hoped for a night's repose to recruit my energies for the morrow. This sleep I craved was no luxurious indulgence of pampered inclination, but my stock in trade—my bone, my sinew, my heart's courage, my mental inspiration, the immediate jewel of my soul.
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing:
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my NIGHT'S SLEEP
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
But let me now repose again: tenderly entreated, softly courted, sleep may return. There are many specifics for bringing slumber to mutinous eyelids. Let me remember what they are.
First. To think of the wind blowing on a field of grain. Watch with your mind's eye the long wavy undulations, the golden sheen which takes the light. What a dreamy, exquisite rhythm! (Still, I don't sleep.)
Second. Repeat the multiplication-table backward, from twelve times down to twice. (Hopeless, the only result being to render my mathematical powers acutely, preternaturally awake, so that I begin to estimate the magnitude of my summer expenses.)
Third. Try to decide where to spend the August vacation. I am thinking of Lake George, the Saguenay, Sea Girt, the White Mountains, when all at once I begin to yield drowsily to the influence of long conversations about nothing which take possession of my mind—mere gibberish, strings of words without sense. Thank Heaven, I am off! I am actually going to sleep. Not yet!
Down the street comes a man with an accordion. He is playing "Annie Laurie." Every now and then he strikes a wrong note. Excruciating agony! Did he render it correctly it might blend with a romantic dream, but when he insists on flatting persistently, as for bonnie Annie Laurie he offers to lay him down and die, who is to bear it? And why does he not consummate the proffered sacrifice by dying at once? I would cheerfully bury him. He passes slowly, lingeringly, seeming to pause outside of my window, as if my casement enshrined that form like the snowdrift and that throat like the swan's. But, although he vanishes finally, the street has become alive. Two men pass in deeply-interesting conversation, one of them assuring the other that he has not done "a stroke's work" in two years. He is maudlin, of course. "A stroke's work"? And as if any man could expect to find work and to do it after keeping such hours as these!