or the twilight
hours. Yet as the sun rises alike upon the just and upon the unjust even
so does he descend, and we put a slight upon Providence if we abandon to
rogues and rakes that wonderful kingdom of the darkness of which by
natural prerogative we are enfranchised. By never using our proper
freedom, we give them prescriptive licence of usurpation, so that the
hours in which the heavens are nearest to us are become the peculiar
inheritance of thieves.

I confess that on the night when first I set out to do without a bedroom
I too felt all the force of the traditional mistrust. I heard human
whispers in the wind, and saw the shadows of walls and trees as forms of
men lurking to spring out against me. The movements of roosting birds
startled me as I passed; the sudden silences startled me more. And when
I had spread my gear on the ground and settled down to rest, the sense
of exposure on every side made sleep impossible; time after time I
seemed to hear footsteps stealthily approaching; and there was a
strangeness pervading everything which to my nervous fancy was simply
provocative of apparitions. This lasted many nights; and whether I
established myself on the edge of a copse, or in the open grass, or in a
hammock beneath two trees, I continued a prey to the same uneasy
wakefulness. But then, as if satisfied of good faith by such
perseverance, the night began to wear a friendly aspect, the shadows
gave up their ghosts, and the breezes became the expected messengers of
slumber.

When the lonely sleeper-out has grown familiar with the moonlight and
the darkness, he is admitted into the number of earth's favoured sons;
for lying like a child upon her bosom, he hears her heart beating in the
silence, and wakes to see her smiling in her beauty like a queen
apparelled. To no man slumber comes more gently than to him; and his
uprising is as that of a child exulting in the cloudless day. Health and
innocence return to him, and his one sorrow is that he has lived into
maturity without continually partaking of these sane and natural
delights. Remorse is his that for all these years he has feared the dews
and shrunk from the bland night airs; and remembering the needless
imprisonment of a hundred chambers, he mourns over the irrecoverable
hours which would have rooted his life more deeply in tranquillity and
strength. But the June sun is up, and the birds are singing: he strides
with light step over the grass, watching the r