COMMON INCIDENTS. 19 



that of the supine, comatose, flea-bitten snoozling, who lies uncon- 

 sciously degraded into a common rail-road for bugs ? The beings 

 are perfectly distinct ; they bear the same analogy to each other, as 

 a Dutch clock, with its weights, to the compensating mercurial pen- 

 dulum of a chronometer ; or, the object-glass of a celestial telescope 

 to the fresh puttied pane in a tap-room window. Let not, therefore, 

 the reader fall into error, by supposing that every one is morally 

 constituted to become an early riser. Such an impression might 

 urge many a mistaken simpleton to get out of his bed with no more 

 favourable result to himself than the execration of the inmates of the 

 house where he lodged, a cold, and sore throat, and a two-hours-state 

 of wondering abstraction, at what could possibly be the golden secret 

 of the pleasures of confronting the break of day. With all this, it 

 must not be presumed that early rising is without its concomitant 

 miseries even to the practitioner, when the varied business of life 

 throws him out of the channel of his usual habits. The benefits be- 

 stowed by nature, like the current coins of government, are never 

 suffered to circulate without alloy. 



Among other rigid examples of this depressing truth, my first 

 morning at Brighton was a weary instance. I rose at six o'clock : 

 it was the month of December : my tobacco-pouch furnished 

 flint, steel, and German tinder, towards a light, and a pipe of fragrant 

 tobacco. Cigars were not then so very much in vogue : besides, had 

 they so been, I hold it decidedly inconvenient for a man, upon whom 

 nature has shed a more than average luxuriance of nose, to smoke a 

 cigar. True it is, we now daily see lighted cigars burning beneath 

 noses from infinitesimal admeasurement, up to the portico of two-and- 

 a-half inch horizontal projection. But this is solely attributable to 

 idiosyncratic affectation. If you take the pains, reader, to look stea- 

 dily into the eyes of the wearer of this exaggerated architecture, you 

 will see them ever and anon streaming in tears, as the products of 

 destructive distillation are eddied into the yawning recipient. You 

 will see one thus gifted, continually removing the cigar from his 

 mouth, to appease the agony of the Schneiderian membrane. More- 

 over, we all know that a four-inch cigar, which is about an average 

 length, cannot (allowing half an inch for insertion into the mouth) 

 burn under a two-and-a-half inch emunctory; meeting, as it must do, 

 the current of air occasioned by walking, without fixing upon such a 

 pent-house for its chimney and smoke-consumer. The thing is self- 

 evident. 1 beg pardon for this digression. 



My pipe and travelling-lamp lighted, I cast one look towards my 

 window, and sat down to follow the only rational amusement within 

 my grasp viz. reading. Time passed, as it always ought to do in 

 reading, unheeded. At length the fainter lustre of my lamp warned 

 me that day was approaching, or approached ; for, encircled as my 

 chamber was by adjacent buildings, the term ' day-light' was a vague 

 and comparative expression. Long before this epoch, I had craved 

 my usual indulgence of a cup of coffee ; but this could not be effected 

 without disturbing the house. I therefore at once dismissed the 

 thought : for, as I hope I have elsewhere given the reader to under- 

 stand, the early riser, ' par excellence," is a sensitive being, and 



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