The one change entailed another; for many years—until, indeed, the button habit had become invincible—it did not occur to any of the fair sex that the hook-and-eye could be used in front as well as surreptitiously behind the back. That truth has now penetrated the female mind and sometimes warms it into action: but for the most part lovely woman is infested with the parasitic button as badly as the male of her species, and of neither does it manifest a disposition to let go. It has usually its buttonhole to bear it company, and doubtless looks forward to a long season of domestic felicity and profound repose while engaged in the business of breaking up families and promoting breaches of the peace by sapping the foundation of temper, leveling the outworks of patience and desolating the whole domain of the Christian virtues. SLEEP It is hardly a “burning question”; it is not even a “problem that presses for solution.” Nevertheless, to minds not incurious as to the future it has a mild, pleasing interest, like that of the faintly heard beating of the bells of distant cows that will come in and demand attention later. It by no means appears that sleep is a natural function, the necessity of which inheres in animal life and the constitution of things; there is reason to regard it as a phenomenon due rather to stress of circumstances—a kind of intermittent disorder incurred by exposure to conditions that are being slowly but surely removed. Precisely as sanitary and medical science and improved methods of living are gradually extending the length of human life in every civilized country and threatening the king of shadows himself with death ere, in the poet’s sense, “Time shall throw a dart” at him, so we may observe already the initial stages of a successful campaign against his brother “Sleep.” Civilized peoples sleep fewer hours than savage ones, and, among the civilized, dwellers in cities fewer than country folk. The reason is not far to seek: it is a matter of light.