--Eden-like--just as a dozer's _sanctorum_ ought to be! The only thing attendant on the doze of an inside passenger, is the great chance of being suddenly aroused by the entrance of company. O tell me, ye of the fine nerve, what is more vexing than to be startled from your nest by the creaking slam of the steps, the bleak winter gales galloping along your face, and a whole bundle of human beings pushing themselves into your retreat! There is no rose without its thorn, as myriads have said before me:-- ----"O beate Sexti, Vitae summa brevis SPEM nos vetat inchoare LONGAM!" Not all the morose sarcasms of Johnson, on the pleasures of rural life, have ever weakened my capability for enjoying it at convenient intervals. His antipathy to the country resembled his contempt for blank-verse--_he_ could not enjoy it. I have now moped away a considerable number of months in this city of all things--this--this London. "Well?" Pray restrain yourself, reader; I am coming to the point in due season. During my metropolitan existence--although I am neither a tailor, nor any trade, nor anything exactly--I have never beheld a downright intellectual-looking blade of grass. I mean much by an intellectual blade of grass. The Londoners--poor conceited creatures!--have denominated sundry portions of their Babylon "fields." But--I ask it in all the honest pride of sheer ignorance--is there the ghost even of a bit of grass to be seen in many of them? I cannot easily forget my vexation, when, after a tedious walk to one of those misnomered "fields," I found nothing but a weather-beaten, muggy, smoky assemblage of houses of all sizes, circumscribed by appropriate filth and abundant cabbage-stumps. Innocent of London quackeries, I strolled forth with the full hope of laying me down on a velvet carpet of grass--the birds carolling around me--and, perchance, a flock of lambkins, tunefully baying to their mammas!! "Said I to myself," when I reached these fields, "what a fool I am!" I had contemplated a doze on the grass. But leaving all thoughts of disappointment, who will not allow that there is something exceedingly delightful in dozing calmly beneath the shade of an o'er-arching tree? ----"recubans sub tegmine fagi."