“Now, my dear,” said I, as I wound up the ponderous machinery with a huge key, “as you are always an early riser, and as, of course, you will be up before seven o’clock, I will set the indicator at that hour, so that you will not be disturbed by the progress of science. It is getting to be very cold, my dear, but how beautiful the stars are to-night. Look at Orion and the Pleiades! Intensely lustrous in the frosty sky.” The sensations one experiences in lying down upon a complication of mechanical forces are somewhat peculiar if they are not entirely novel. I once had the pleasure, for one week, of sleeping over the boiler of a high-pressure Mississippi steamboat; and, as I knew in case of a blow up I should be the first to hear of it, I composed my mind as well as I could under the circumstances. But this reposing upon a bed of statics and dynamics, with the constant chirping and crawling of wheel-work at the bed’s head, with a thought now and then of the inexorable iron elbow below, and an uncertainty as to whether the clock itself might not be too fast, or too slow, caused me to be rather reflective and watchful than composed and drowsy. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the lucent stars in their blue depths, and the midnight moon, now tipping the Palisades with a fringe of silver fire, and was thinking how many centuries that lovely light had played upon those rugged ridges of trap and basalt, and so finally sinking from the reflective to the imaginative, and from the imaginative to the indistinct, at last reached that happy state of half consciousness, between half asleep and asleep, when the clock in the machine woke up, and suddenly struck eight. Of course I knew it was later, but I could not imagine why it should at all, as I presumed the only time of striking was in the morning by way of signal. As Mrs. S. was sound asleep, I concluded not to say anything to her about it; but I could not help thinking what an annoyance it would be if the clock should keep on striking the hours during the night. In a little while the bedclothes seemed to droop at the foot of the bed, to which I did not pay much attention, as I was just then engaged listening to the drum below, that seemed to be steadily engaged in winding up its rope and preparing for action. Then I felt the upper part of the patent bedstead rising up, and then I concluded to jump out, just as the iron elbow began to utter a cry like unto the cry of a steel Katydid, and did jump, but was accidentally preceded by the mattress, one bolster, two pillows, ditto blankets, a brace of threadbare linen sheets, one coverlid, the baby, one cradle (overturned), and Mrs. Sparrowgrass. To gather up these heterogeneous materials of comfort required some little time, and, in the meanwhile, the bedstead subsided. When we retired again, and were once more safely protected from the nipping cold, although pretty well cooled, I could not help speaking of the perfect operation of the