The church clock proclaimed the hour of five, as a gentle rap came at my chamber door. Awakened from a pleasant dream, I started from my couch, and heard with something like vexation, that it was time to dress, in order to prosecute our intended journey to English Harbour. Beautiful as is the breath of “early morn,” still there is something very disagreeable in leaving your comfortable bed, and it may be, your gorgeous dreams, for the dull realities of life, and the necessary, but irksome duties of the toilet. I know I shall be cried down by all lovers of Nature for my unsentimental remarks. Thomson, enraptured with his subject “of early rising,” exclaims with all a poet’s fervour— Falsely luxurious, will not man awake, And, springing from the bed of sloth, enjoy The cool, the fragrant, and the silent hour, To meditation due and sacred song? For is there aught in sleep can charm the wise? To lie in dead oblivion, losing half The fleeting moments of too short a life— Total extinction of th’ enlighten’d soul! Or else to feverish vanity alive, Wilder’d, and tossing through distemper’d dreams, Who would in such a gloomy state remain Longer than nature craves—when every muse And every blooming pleasure wait without, To bless the wildly devious morning walk.” Now, all this sounds very pretty—very romantic indeed; and we begin to fancy the poet amid some “bosky dell,” or upland lawn, his shoes liberally bedewed with those glittering gems, which “hang in every cowslip’s bell,” and his unpowdered locks streaming behind him in the morning gale. But stay, gentle reader! hast thou not heard that Thomson was himself a very sluggard, and loved his warm bed far better than any sylvan scene he could so well describe? And in truth, many and many a poet, even to “Joanna Bailey,” the morning rhymester, has been of the same mind. Then, why should I not tell the truth, and own my sloth—although at the same time, when once abroad, no one feels the nameless “melodies of morn” more than I do. But to resume my subject: the incidents of a day’s journey to English Harbour. After partaking of a light breakfast, and quaffing of that cup “which cheers, but not inebriates,” we stepped into the phaeton, and drove through the town, leaving our friends in “Scotch-row” busily employed in arranging their incongruous goods to the best advantage.