A week has now crept slowly by, and I have not been able to get warm. I shiver as if I had ague; and blankets and hot drinks seem useless. My eyes water when I try to read; and I pass the time studying the wall-paper. I seem to have got mesmerised with it,--discovering faces, figures, and animals among the flowers, only to lose them and search for them again. Wallpapers are diabolical affairs. It never struck me before how barbaric they are; though I remember of being afraid, when I was a little boy, to sit at the right of my grandfather's fire for an ugly demon with long yellow and white legs on the imitation marble mantelpiece. We may call ourselves Liberals, Radicals, or Conservatives, but we are all conservative by nature. The first fiend who designed a wall-paper made the roses run in diagonal lines, and all his successors have followed him in this respect without considering the reason. Why should we have flowers on wall-paper? And if we must submit to flowers, why should they not be natural? Why should not the tired eye be able to rest when we are in bed? Simply because the first fiend who designed wall-papers fixed it on his conservative disciples; he evidently "had them bad" at the time, or was just recovering from a second or third attack, and it is a great pity he had not died under the first. The flowers on my bedroom wall are evidently meant for chrysanthemums; but they are on a colossal scale, and afford every opportunity for one who has the leisure I have had this week of discovering a variety of subjects. There is the head of an old woman with a long nose; but I am annoyed when I look at her, as I want to get up and correct the drawing of her left eye, and, as there are hundreds of her round the room in every repetition of the pattern, I feel I would require a lot of paint. Then I turn away from her and look for the dancing negro, whom I only discovered on Thursday. He is difficult to find, as I am not so familiar with the place. The old woman keeps looking at me from every diamond; and I see the dog's head, with the ears formed by two leaves. But where is the negro? I think, "This is the wall-paper: where is the negro?" and "He won't be happy till he gets it." And when I do find it, my eyes are so tired that I look to the ceiling for a rest; but the negro floats on the ceiling,--only he is green instead of brown, and the old woman is purple. I shut my eyes, but they still float in changing colours. I am certain the first designer had _delirium tremens_. "If I had the designing of wall-papers, I would make them different," I think; but perhaps I am like the gentleman who said, "Give me the making of a country's songs, and I don't care who makes its laws." He never wrote any songs, though no one had the contract.