Discussing the question, some time ago, with an old friend, she gave me her never-failing remedy for sleeplessness, which was to imagine herself performing some trivial action over and over again, until, her mind becoming disgusted with the monotony of life, sleep drew the curtain. Her favourite device was to imagine a picture not hanging quite plumb upon the wall, and then to proceed to straighten it. This I tried--though putting pictures straight is no habit of mine--but it was of no avail. I imagined the picture on the wall without difficulty, and gave it a few deft touches, but this set me thinking of pictures in general, and then I remembered an art exhibition I had attended with my friend T. and what he said, and what I said, and I wondered how T. was faring these days, and whether his son was still at school. And so it went on, until I found myself meditating on cheese, or spiritualism, or the Rocky Mountains--but no sleep! Somewhere in that limbo which Earth describes in _Prometheus Unbound_, that vague region filled with Dreams and the light imaginings of men, is the dreary phantom of an unstraightened picture upon a ghostly wall. And there it shall stay, for I have no further use for it. But I have not yet given up all hope of finding some way of hastening the approach of sleep. Even yet there is a glimmer, for re-reading (not for the first, and, please Heaven! not the last time) Lamb’s letters, I came upon the following, in a note to Southey; ‘But there is a man in my office, a Mr. H., who proses it away from morning to night, and never gets beyond corporal and material verities!... When I can’t sleep o’ nights, I imagine a dialogue with Mr. H., upon a given subject, and go prosing on in fancy with him, till I either laugh or fall asleep. I have literally found it answer.’ ... There is promise in this, and we all have our Mr. H.’s, whose talk, bare of anything like fancy and wit, acts upon us like a dose of laudanum. This very night I will dismiss such trivial phantasies as jumping sheep and crooked pictures, and evoke the phantom of a crushing, stupendous Bore. ON TRAVEL BY TRAIN Remove an Englishman from his hearth and home, his centre of corporal life, and he becomes a very different creature, one capable of sudden furies and roaring passions, a deep sea of strong emotions churning beneath his frozen exterior. I can pass, at all times, for a quiet, neighbourly fellow, yet I have sat, more than once, in a railway carriage with black murder in my heart. At the mere sight of some probably inoffensive fellow-passenger my whole being will be invaded by a million devils of wrath, and I ‘could do such bitter business as the day would quake to look on.’