egin to
move off, when lo! Peter's cap is missing. "Now, where can it be?"
soliloquizes the lady. "I put it right here by the table-leg; maybe it
got into some of the berths." At this suggestion the chambermaid takes
the candle, and goes round deliberately to every berth, poking the light
directly in the face of every sleeper. "Here it is," she exclaims,
pulling at something black under one pillow. "No, indeed, those are my
shoes," says the vexed sleeper. "Maybe it's here," she resumes, darting
upon something dark in another berth. "No, that's my bag," responds the
occupant. The chambermaid then proceeds to turn over all the children on
the floor, to see if it is not under them. In the course of which
process they are most agreeably waked up and enlivened; and when
everybody is broad awake, and most uncharitably wishing the cap, and
Peter too, at the bottom of the canal, the good lady exclaims, "Well, if
this isn't lucky; here I had it safe in my basket all the time!" And she
departed amid the--what shall I say? execrations!--of the whole company,
ladies though they be.

Well, after this follows a hushing up and wiping up among the juvenile
population, and a series of remarks commences from the various shelves
of a very edifying and instructive tendency. One says that the woman did
not seem to know where anything was; another says that she has waked
them all up; a third adds that she has waked up all the children, too;
and the elderly ladies make moral reflections on the importance of
putting your things where you can find them--being always ready; which
observations, being delivered in an exceedingly doleful and drowsy tone,
form a sort of sub-bass to the lively chattering of the upper-shelfites,
who declare that they feel quite awake--that they don't think they shall
go to sleep again to-night, and discourse over everything in creation,
until you heartily wish you were enough related to them to give them a
scolding.

At last, however, voice after voice drops off; you fall into a most
refreshing slumber; it seems to you that you sleep about a quarter of an
hour, when the chambermaid pulls you by the sleeve. "Will you please to
get up, ma'am? We want to make the beds." You start and stare. Sure
enough, the night is gone. So much for sleeping on board canal-boats!

Let us not enumerate the manifold perplexities of the morning toilet in
a place where every lady realizes most forcibly the condition of the old
woman who