ttle, if not wholly, disappointed?

After all, is it not expecting too much to expect a novelist to talk
as cleverly as the clever characters in his novels? Must a dramatist
necessarily go about armed to the teeth with crisp dialogue? May not a
poet be allowed to lay aside his singing-robes and put on a conventional
dress-suit when he dines out? Why is it not permissible in him to be as
prosaic and tiresome as the rest of the company? He usually is.

ON EARLY RISING

A CERTAIN scientific gentleman of my acquaintance, who has devoted years
to investigating the subject, states that he has never come across a
case of remarkable longevity unaccompanied by the habit of early rising;
from which testimony it might be inferred that they die early who lie
abed late. But this would be getting out at the wrong station. That the
majority of elderly persons are early risers is due to the simple
fact that they cannot sleep mornings. After a man passes his fiftieth
milestone he usually awakens at dawn, and his wakefulness is no credit
to him. As the theorist confined his observations to the aged, he easily
reached the conclusion that men live to be old because they do not sleep
late, instead of perceiving that men do not sleep late because they are
old. He moreover failed to take into account the numberless young lives
that have been shortened by matutinal habits.

The intelligent reader, and no other is supposable, need not be told
that the early bird aphorism is a warning and not an incentive. The fate
of the worm refutes the pretended ethical teaching of the proverb,
which assumes to illustrate the advantage of early rising and does so by
showing how extremely dangerous it is. I have no patience with the worm,
and when I rise with the lark I am always careful to select a lark that
has overslept himself.

The example set by this mythical bird, a mythical bird so far as New
England is concerned, has wrought wide-spread mischief and discomfort.
It is worth noting that his method of accomplishing these ends is
directly the reverse of that of the Caribbean insect mentioned
by Lafcadio Hearn in his enchanting "Two Years in the French West
Indies"--a species of colossal cricket called the wood-kid; in the
creole tongue, _cabritt-bois_. This ingenious pest works a soothing,
sleep-compelling chant from sundown until precisely half past four in
the morning, when it suddenly stops and by its silence awakens everybody
it has lulled