usiness, it follows, that the only time
we could spare for this manufactory of jokes--our supplementary
livelihood, that supplied us in every want beyond mere bread and
cheese--was exactly that part of the day which (as we have heard of No
Man's Land) may be fitly denominated No Man's Time; that is, no time
in which a man ought to be up, and awake, in. To speak more plainly,
it is that time, of an hour, or an hour and a half's duration, in
which a man, whose occasions call him up so preposterously, has to
wait for his breakfast.

O those headaches at dawn of day, when at five, or half-past-five in
summer, and not much later in the dark seasons, we were compelled to
rise, having been perhaps not above four hours in bed--(for we were no
go-to-beds with the lamb, though we anticipated the lark ofttimes in
her rising--we liked a parting cup at midnight, as all young men did
before these effeminate times, and to have our friends about us--we
were not constellated under Aquarius, that watery sign, and therefore
incapable of Bacchus, cold, washy, bloodless--we were none of your
Basilian water-sponges, nor had taken our degrees at Mount Ague--we
were right toping Capulets, jolly companions, we and they)--but to
have to get up, as we said before, curtailed of half our fair sleep,
fasting, with only a dim vista of refreshing Bohea in the distance--to
be necessitated to rouse ourselves at the detestable rap of an old
hag of a domestic, who seemed to take a diabolical pleasure in her
announcement that it was "time to rise;" and whose chappy knuckles
we have often yearned to amputate, and string them up at our chamber
door, to be a terror to all such unseasonable rest-breakers in
future--

"Facil" and sweet, as Virgil sings, had been the "descending" of the
over-night, balmy the first sinking of the heavy head upon the pillow;
but to get up, as he goes on to say,

--revocare gradus, superasque evadere ad auras--

and to get up moreover to make jokes with malice prepended--there was
the "labour," there the "work."

No Egyptian taskmaster ever devised a slavery like to that, our
slavery. No fractious operants ever turned out for half the tyranny,
which this necessity exercised upon us. Half a dozen jests in a day
(bating Sundays too), why, it seems nothing! We make twice the number
every day in our lives as a matter of course, and claim no Sabbatical
exemptions. But then they come into our head. But when the head has to
go ou