See how a sleepy child will put off the inevitable departure for bed. The
little creature's eyes blink and stare, and it needs constant jogging to
prevent his nodding off into the slumber which nature craves. His waking is
a pain; he is quite worn out, and peevish, and stupid, and yet he implores
a respite, and deprecates repose, and vows he is not sleepy, even to the
moment when his mother takes him in her arms, and carries him, in a sweet
slumber, to the nursery. So it is with us old children of earth and the
great sleep of death, and nature our kind mother. Just so reluctantly we
part with consciousness, the picture is, even to the last, so interesting;
the bird in the hand, though sick and moulting, so inestimably better than
all the brilliant tenants of the bush. We sit up, yawning, and blinking,
and stupid, the whole scene swimming before us, and the stories and music
humming off into the sound of distant winds and waters. It is not time yet;
we are not fatigued; we are good for another hour still, and so protesting
against bed, we falter and drop into the dreamless sleep which nature
assigns to fatigue and satiety.
He then spoke a little eulogy of his brother, very polished, and,
indeed, in a kind of way, eloquent. He possessed in a high degree that
accomplishment, too little cultivated, I think, by the present generation,
of expressing himself with perfect precision and fluency. There was, too,
a good deal of slight illustrative quotation, and a sprinkling of French
flowers, over his conversation, which gave to it a character at once
elegant and artificial. It was all easy, light, and pointed, and being
quite new to me, had a wonderful fascination.
He then told me that Bartram was the temple of liberty, that the health of
a whole life was founded in a few years of youth, air, and exercise, and
that accomplishments, at least, if not education, should wait upon health.
Therefore, while at Bartram, I should dispose of my time quite as I
pleased, and the more I plundered the garden and gipsied in the woodlands,
the better.
Then he told me what a miserable invalid he was, and how the doctors
interfered with his frugal tastes. A glass of beer and a mutton chop--his
ideal of a dinner--he dared not touch. They made him drink light wines,
which he detested, and live upon those artificial abominations all liking
for which vanishes with youth.
There stood on a side-table, in its silver coaster, a long-necked Rhenish
bottle, and beside it a thin pink glass, and he quivered his fingers in a
peevish way toward them.
But unless he found himself better very soon, he would take his case into
his own hands, and try the dietary to which nature pointed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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