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 into slumber with its insidious croon. Mr. Hearn, with
strange obtuseness to the enormity of the thing, blandly remarks: "For
thousands of early risers too poor to own a clock, the cessation of its
song is the signal to get up." I devoutly trust that none of the West
India islands furnishing such satanic entomological specimens will
ever be annexed to the United States. Some of our extreme advocates of
territorial expansion might spend a profitable few weeks on one of those
favored isles. A brief association with that _cabritt-bois_ would be
likely to cool the enthusiasm of the most ardent imperialist.

An incalculable amount of specious sentiment has been lavished upon
daybreak, chiefly by poets who breakfasted, when they did breakfast, at