O those headaches at dawn of day, when at five, or half-past-five in summer, and not much later in the dark seasons, we were compelled to rise, having been perhaps not above four hours in bed—­(for we were no go-to-beds with the lamb, though we anticipated the lark ofttimes in her rising—­we liked a parting cup at midnight, as all young men did before these effeminate times, and to have our friends about us—­we were not constellated under Aquarius, that watery sign, and therefore incapable of Bacchus, cold, washy, bloodless—­we were none of your Basilian water-sponges, nor had taken our degrees at Mount Ague—­we were right toping Capulets, jolly companions, we and they)—­but to have to get up, as we said before, curtailed of half our fair sleep, fasting, with only a dim vista of refreshing Bohea in the distance—­to be necessitated to rouse ourselves at the detestable rap of an old hag of a domestic, who seemed to take a diabolical pleasure in her announcement that it was “time to rise;” and whose chappy knuckles we have often yearned to amputate, and string them up at our chamber door, to be a terror to all such unseasonable rest-breakers in future—­

“Facil” and sweet, as Virgil sings, had been the “descending” of the over-night, balmy the first sinking of the heavy head upon the pillow; but to get up, as he goes on to say,

  —­revocare gradus, superasque evadere ad auras—­

and to get up moreover to make jokes with malice prepended—­there was the “labour,” there the “work.”

No Egyptian taskmaster ever devised a slavery like to that, our slavery.  No fractious operants ever turned out for half the tyranny, which this necessity exercised upon us.  Half a dozen jests in a day (bating Sundays too), why, it seems nothing!  We make twice the number every day in our lives as a matter of course, and claim no Sabbatical exemptions.  But then they come into our head.  But when the head has to go out to them—­when the mountain must go to Mahomet—­

Reader, try it for once, only for one short twelvemonth.

It was not every week that a fashion of pink stockings came up; but mostly, instead of it, some rugged, untractable subject; some topic impossible to be contorted into the risible; some feature, upon which no smile could play; some flint, from which no process of ingenuity could procure a distillation.  There they lay; there your appointed tale of brick-making was set before you, which you must finish, with or without straw, as it happened.  The craving Dragon—­the Public—­like him in Bel’s temple—­must be fed; it expected its daily rations; and Daniel, and ourselves, to do us justice, did the best we could on this side bursting him.