Once in bed, when it is time to close the five ports of knowledge, most folks I know seem to find no difficulty in plunging their earthly parts into oblivion. It is not so with me, to whom sleep is a coy mistress, much given to a teasing inconstancy and for ever demanding to be wooed--‘lest too light winning make the prize light.’ I used to read, with wonder, those sycophantic stories of the warlike supermen, the great troublers of the world’s peace, Cromwell, Napoleon, and the like, who, thanks to their ‘iron wills,’ could lie down and plunge themselves immediately into deep sleep, to wake up, refreshed, at a given time. Taking these fables to heart, I would resolve to do likewise, and, going to bed, would clench my teeth, look as determined as possible in the darkness, and command the immediate presence of sleep. But alas! the very act of concentration seemed to make me more wakeful than ever, and I would pass hours in tormenting sleeplessness. I had overlooked the necessity of having an ‘iron will,’ my own powers of will having little or none of this peculiar metallic quality. But how uncomfortable it must have been living with these iron-willed folks! Who would want to remonstrate and argue with them? It would be worse than beating an anvil with a sledge-hammer. I must confess that I always suspect the men who boast that they unvaryingly fall asleep as soon as they get into bed--those ‘as soon as my head touches the pillow’ fellows. To me, there is something inhuman, something callous and almost bovine, in the practice. I suspect their taste in higher matters. Iron wills apart, there must be a lack of human sympathy or depth in a man who can thus throw off, with his clothes, his waking feelings and thoughts, and ignore completely those memories and fancies which “...will sometimes leap, From hiding-places ten years deep.” To share a bed-room with one of these fellows is to lose one’s faith in human nature, for, even after the most eventful day, there is no comparing notes with them, no midnight confidence, no casting up the balance of the day’s pleasure and pain. They sink, at once, into stupid, heavy slumber, leaving you to your own mental devices. And they all snore abominably! The artificial ways of inducing sleep are legion, and are only alike in their ineffectuality. In _Lavengro_ (or is it _Romany Rye_?) there is an impossible character, a victim of insomnia, who finds that a volume of Wordsworth’s poems is the only sure soporific; but that was Borrow’s malice. The famous old plan of counting sheep jumping over a stile has never served my turn. I have herded imaginary sheep until they insisted on turning themselves into white bears or blue pigs, and I defy any reasonable man to fall asleep while mustering a herd of cerulean swine.