In vain have you tried the humbugging recipe of saying the Multiplication Table; in vain have you repeated poetry by the yard, or counted one hundred; in vain have you conjugated verbs, or done any of the foolish things recommended in such cases. Two o'clock has just struck, and no somniferous result has followed. Well—if you can't sleep, you won't sleep, that's all. You'll just get up, and strike a light and read. You do it; but the fire is low, and cold shivers run up and down your back-bone. You're hungry! yes—that must be it. You'll go to the closet, and get a bit of cold chicken you wot of. Good heavens! if those lumpish, snoring wretches haven't devoured it before going to bed. You go look at the creature vindictively; you know just who would be capable of such a meanness. She has slept there these three hours, on the strength of that bit of purloined chicken—your chicken—while you haven't closed an eyelash. She will sleep comfortably till daylight; and get up with a clear head, and refreshed limbs, to breakfast. Then she will eat, like a great healthy animal, while food looks perfectly nauseous to you, who will then be too exhausted to be hungry. You look at the creature again, and think of Judith and Holofernes; and don't wonder as you used at Judith. Indeed, she seems to you at that moment rather an estimable person than otherwise; and as to pitying Holofernes, why should you pity anybody who could sleep?

You walk to the window. It is some comfort that the stars have to wink all night as well as you. And there's a policeman, dragging up and down in the cold, and clapping his hands across his breast to keep warm. Good! you're glad of it. Four o'clock! Gracious! how you will feel to-morrow. If you only had a bottle of ale to make you stupid and drowsy. And sure enough, now you think of it, there is just one left. You seize it! Why—somebody has unwired the cork. Merciful man! it is only Ink. Now, that's a little too much for a tired soul. Suppose you should begin and run from the top of the stairs to the bottom, as fast and as loud as you could, and wake up the whole family. And as the vision of terrified night-gowns rises before your mental vision, you commence grinning noiselessly like a maniac; then laughing hysterically; then crying outright; and the next thing you know it is eight o'clock in the morning, and coffee and rolls and beefsteak are awaiting your advent.

And as to musquitoes. Ah! you too have suffered. You have lain, hour after hour, listening to that never-ceasing war-song, till you were as nervous as a hump-backed cat face to face with Jowler in a corner. You have "turned over;" you have lain on your side, lain on your back, lain on your face, spite of your prominent nose. You have doubled your fists up under your arm-pits, and twisted your feet into hard knots under your night-clothes, to no avail. You have then fallen back on your dignity and the pigmy-ness of your tormentors, and folding your arms resolutely over your chest, and looking fiercely up to the ceiling, exclaimed:

And yet, at that very moment, an "owdacious" bite has sent you, with a smothered exclamation, into the middle of the floor, bewailing the day you were born.

Next day you get a "musquito net." What a fool not to think of it before. You festoon it round your bed. It looks pink-y and safe. You explore it carefully that night before getting in, that no treacherous crevice be left for the enemy. You put out the light, and oh! happiness unutterable, listen to their howl of rage outside, which sounds like the "music of the spheres," and fall asleep. Next morning you wake with a splitting headache. Can it be the confined air of the net? Horrible! You spend that day nursing your head and your wrath. Why were musquitoes made? You find no satisfactory solution. What do they live on when not devouring human beings? Why, in the same bed, is one bitten and the other left? Why infest New York, and leave Brooklyn, whose inhabitants deserve punishment for monopolizing Beecher? Why, if they must bite, not pitch in at once, instead of stopping to harrow you by giving a concert.

That night you refuse to gasp under a net, for all the musquitoes that ever swarmed. You even light your gas defiantly, open the windows, and sneer at the black demons as they buzz in for their nocturnal raid. You sit and read—occasionally boxing your own ears—till the small hours, and then—to bed; only to dash frantically against the wall, throw your pillows at the enemy, laugh hysterically, and rise at daylight a blear-eyed, spotted, dismal wretch!