pleasant dreams, which would seem necessarily to include the art of
going to sleep, came into my head. Now, as I often used to read
that paper when I was a very small boy, and as I recollect
everything I read then as perfectly as I forget everything I read
now, I quoted 'Get out of bed, beat up and turn your pillow, shake
the bed-clothes well with at least twenty shakes, then throw the
bed open and leave it to cool; in the meanwhile, continuing
undrest, walk about your chamber. When you begin to feel the cold
air unpleasant, then return to your bed, and you will soon fall
asleep, and your sleep will be sweet and pleasant.' Not a bit of
it! I performed the whole ceremony, and if it were possible for me
to be more saucer-eyed than I was before, that was the only result
that came of it.

Except Niagara. The two quotations from Washington Irving and
Benjamin Franklin may have put it in my head by an American
association of ideas; but there I was, and the Horse-shoe Fall was
thundering and tumbling in my eyes and ears, and the very rainbows
that I left upon the spray when I really did last look upon it,
were beautiful to see. The night-light being quite as plain,
however, and sleep seeming to be many thousand miles further off
than Niagara, I made up my mind to think a little about Sleep;
which I no sooner did than I whirled off in spite of myself to
Drury Lane Theatre, and there saw a great actor and dear friend of
mine (whom I had been thinking of in the day) playing Macbeth, and
heard him apostrophising 'the death of each day's life,' as I have
heard him many a time, in the days that are gone.

But, Sleep. I WILL think about Sleep. I am determined to think
(this is the way I went on) about Sleep. I must hold the word