in daylight rather a merry comrade. But at night, when the children
of nerves lay stretched, he threw off the mask. As soon as they had
fairly nestled, he smote their pillows a shattering blow, loud for the
retold preluding quarters, incredibly clanging the number ten. Then he
waited for neighbouring campanili to box the ears of slumber's votaries
in turn; whereupon, under pretence of excessive conscientiousness, or
else oblivious of his antecedent, damnable misconduct, or perhaps in
actual league and trapdoor conspiracy with the surging goblin hosts
beneath us, he resumed his blaring strokes, a sonorous recapitulation
of the number; all the others likewise. It was an alarum fit to warn
of Attila or Alaric; and not, simply the maniacal noise invaded
the fruitful provinces of sleep like Hun and Vandal, the irrational
repetition ploughed the minds of those unhappy somnivolents, leaving
them worse than sheared by barbarians, disrupt, as by earthquake, with
the unanswerable question to Providence, Why!--Why twice?

Designing slumberers are such infants. When they have undressed and
stretched themselves, flat, it seems that they have really gone back to
their mothers' breasts, and they fret at whatsoever does not smack
of nature, or custom. The cause of a repetition so senseless in its
violence, and so unnecessary, set them querying and kicking until the
inevitable quarters recommenced. Then arose an insurgent rabble in
their bosoms, it might be the loosened imps of darkness, urging them to
speculate whether the proximate monster about to dole out the eleventh
hour in uproar would again forget himself and repeat his dreary
arithmetic a second time; for they were unaware of his religious
obligation, following the hour of the district, to inform them of the
tardy hour of Rome. They waited in suspense, curiosity enabling them to
bear the first crash callously. His performance was the same. And now
they took him for a crazy engine whose madness had infected the whole
neighbourhood. Now was the moment to fight for sleep in contempt of him,
and they began by simulating an entry into the fortress they were
to defend, plunging on their pillows, battening down their eyelids,
breathing with a dreadful regularity. Alas! it came to their knowledge
that the Bell was in possession and they the besiegers. Every resonant
quarter was anticipated up to the blow, without averting its murderous
abruptness; and an executioner Midnight that sounde