housekeepers, and that the feathery hills where a head should repose sou'-by-west are to be found upheaved at opposite ends of the compass. Still, as Hercules spun, and Achilles played among girls, so their modern brother may attain the art of bed-making, by dint of patience and insuperable attention. But until he be thoroughly broken in, to the third and fourth generation, the odds are yet against his performing that task wilfully, whenever he can possibly avoid it. And if he go not to his work with eager and pertinacious consciousness, whither flies the significance of the valuable saying which celebrates his industry? For that we shall abide by the consequences of our own voluntary acts, is the sagacious lesson intended to be enforced in this insufferable jargon about a man and a bed.
Even supposing that the condemned take pleasure in his new and delicate vocation, that his hand be agreeably dedicated to the eliminating of creases from the mattress, and the chastising of pillows, "non-conductors to the day," that their spirits may rise proportionately, we cannot conceive of any known law by which he is to be forced to recline on the precise scene of his labors; or, if such a law exist, we cannot aver that it will be any sort of punishment to lay his cheek on the clean and comfortable throne which, in his waking hours, he had prepared for it.
Why should he not pass his nights elsewhere, and never once in the bed, which, because he hath dressed it, the wretched saw calleth "his"? Can he not hospitably extend it to a guest or a beggar? Might he not doze in an easy-chair, or knot himself into a sitting posture, like an Indian brave, sleeping warily on the floor of his demesne ? or stretch, cat-wise, on a rug, or betake himself to a hammock beneath oaks, or to a piny couch, and "lie sub dio, under the canopy of heaven"? How should the man, with so noble a choice, have to do with any bed unless he choose it? Familiarity breedeth contempt. If the man made the bed, and vexed his brain with its blankety rubric, so much the more reason that he should tire of it, and follow his fancy in eschewing it for some unaccursed substitute. The popular fallacy is that he made it, and that he is in it, world without end, for his pains: whereas sober reason affirmeth that not only could he never have made it, under given average circumstances, but that were he confined to it (as an ingenious and vindicatory Occidental set-off to the Chinese prisoner who is kept nocturnally on his tottering feet, and forever denied the solace of his couch, till his body die of wakefulness), nothing, not fragrance of Thessalian bays, nor fruit dripping with dews of September, could be so truly benedictory and loving to our man under sentence as the sleep that, be he but a healthy mortal, would surely close upon him, with incalculable gentleness, before he had been a half-hour in his calumniated bed.
