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“Mrs. Sparrowgrass,” said I, during one of
the remarkably bland evenings we have had
lately; “there is, at last, an offer for our horse.”
This good news being received with an incredulous
look, I pulled from my pocket the Louisville
Journal, and read therein as follows:

“The admirers of `Mr. Sparrowgrass' will be pleased to learn,
that he bargained for a horse. After detailing his experiences
with the animal, Mr. Sparrowgrass thus posts him: `Does anybody
want a horse at a low price.” A good, stylish-looking animal,
close-ribbed, good loin, and good stifle, sound legs, with
only the heaves, and the blind staggers, and a slight defect in one
of his eyes?” We can put Mr. S. in the way of a trade. We
know a physician, who feeds his horse well, who pays more for
horsewhips than for provender. He would trade for any animal
that has a thin skin and a good memory.”

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“Well,” said Mrs. Sp., “what of that? What
can you do in relation to the matter? You have not
seen the other horse.” “True,” I replied, “but
that need not prevent me SHIPPING MINE! And
you may depend upon it, if ever I get him on
board ship, and the bill of lading is in my pocket,
no earthly power can make me take him back
again. I shall say to the captain, `My dear sir;
that horse is not accustomed to going, but, if he has
any go in him, he will have to go now.' ” This play
upon words, so entirely original, struck me as
being pretty fair; whereupon, I sat down quite
complacently to read the rest of the paper. “But,”
continued Mrs. Sparrowgrass, smoothing her hair
with both hands, “suppose, after they get him on
board the vessel, they should find out what kind
of a horse he was, and suppose, then, they should
refuse to take him, how could you help it?”
“Why, my dear,” replied I, “if I have a bill of
lading, they must take him. A bill of lading is a
certificate or contract signed by the captain and
owners of the vessel, in which they agree to carry
such and such goods from the port where they
receive them, to the port to which the vessel is
bound. A bill of lading reads something like

[figure description] Page 210.[end figure description]

this: `Shipped in good order, and well-conditioned'”—

“How does it begin?” said Mrs. S., with the
first word in the key of C sharp.

“Shipped in good order, and well-conditioned,”
I responded, but my voice was in the key of F
minor. For here, at the very threshold of my
hope, was a barrier. The terms of the bill of
lading itself would prevent me shipping him.
How could I say he was “in good order and well-conditioned?”

To my mind, there is nothing so common in life
as disappointments. Let any man take his happiest
day, and see if it be not somewhat flecked
and flawed with them. I think the most favored
could count twenty balks to one success in his
past days. The human mind is apt to anticipate
the end before the beginning has begun. Tom
Ailanthus hears he has fallen heir to an estate
worth one hundred thousand dollars, and before he
sleeps, buys a house near Fifth Avenue, furnishes
it, gets married, presents his wife with a splendid
set of diamonds, invests forty thousand as special
partner in some safe concern, makes another
fortune, does the tour of Europe, gets back,

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marries off his daughters, moves into the country,
builds a villa, with lawns, fish-ponds, conservatories,
hot and cold graperies, and circulates around his
domains, the Sir Roger de Coverly of the neighborhood.
But when the estate comes to be settled,
and its value established, Tom Ailanthus, who
before never had kept a dollar long enough in his
company to get thoroughly acquainted with it,
finds himself a poor man, with only fifty thousand.
His anticipations have presented him with fifty
thousand disappointments. So we go:


“The space between the ideal of man's soul
And man's achievement, who hath ever past?
An ocean spreads between us and that goal,
Where anchor ne'er was cast!”
We are born to disappointments as the sparks fly
upward. See, now, how my anticipations were
balked. I had imagined everything when I read
that paragraph. Look upon the picture:

THE HORSE—HIS EXODUS.

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“Now, Mrs. Sparrowgrass, I had imagined all
of that panorama; and here we are, with the horse
upon our hands, just because bills of lading begin
in the way they do. I believe I shall have to make
him a present to some bone-boiling establishment.”
“That is a cruel thought,” said Mrs. S. “By the
way,” said I, “what do you think of my poetry,
my dear?” Mrs. Sparrowgrass answered she had
not heard any poetry, except now and then a
rhyme, which seemed to come in the prose very
well. “Prose,” said I, “prose? Do you not
know the verse is octameter catalectic, alternating
with lines of a trochee and a half, sometimes
irregulated in order to give scope to my fancy?”
Mrs. Sparrowgrass said it did not strike her in that
way. “Then if it did not strike you it cannot be
poetry. Of course not. Poetry to be poetry must

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strike. If it do not, then it is not poetry, but, Mrs.
Sp. it may be (excuse me) werse.”

I have bought me a new patent bedstead, to
facilitate early rising, called a “wake-up.” It is a
good thing to rise early in the country. Even in
the winter time it is conducive to health to get out
of a warm bed by lamp-light; to shiver into your
drawers and slippers; to wash your face in a basin
of ice-flakes; and to comb out your frigid hair
with an uncompromising comb, before a frosty
looking-glass. The only difficulty about it lies in
the impotence of human will. You will deliberate
about it, and argue the point. You will induge
in specious pretences, and lie still with only the tip
end of your nose outside the blankets; you will
pretend to yourself that you do intend to jump out
in a few minutes; you will tamper with the good
intention, and yet indulge in the delicious luxury.
To all this the “wake-up,” is inflexibly and triumphantly
antagonistic. It is a bedstead with a
clock scientifically inserted in the head-board.
When you go to bed, you wind up the clock, and
point the index-hand to that hour on the dial, at
which you wish to rise in the morning. Then you
place yourself in the hands of the invention, and

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shut your eyes. You are now, as it were, under
the guardianship of King Solomon and Doctor
Benjamin Franklin. There is no need to recall
those beautiful lines of the poet's—


“Early to bed, and early to rise,
Will make a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
Science has forestalled them. The “wake-up” is a
combination of hard wood, hinges, springs, and
clock-work, against sleeping late o' mornings. It
is a bedstead, with all the beautiful vitality of a
flower—it opens with the dawn. If, for instance,
you set the hand against six o'clock, in the morning,
at six, the clock at the bed's head solemnly
strikes a demi-twelve on its sonorous bell. If you
pay no attention to the monitor, or idly, dreamily
endeavor to compass the coherent sequence of
sounds, the invention, within the succeding two
minutes, drops its tail-board, and lets down your
feet upon the floor. While you are pleasantly
defeating this attempt upon your privacy, by
drawing up your legs within the precincts of the
blankets, the virtuous head-board, and the rest of
the bed, suddenly rise up in protest; and the next
moment, if you do not instantly abdicate, you are

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launched upon the floor by a blind elbow that connects
with the crank of an eccentric, that is turned
by a cord, that is wound around a drum, that is
moved by an endless screw, that revolves within
the body of the machinery. So soon as you are
turned out, of course, you waive the balance of the
nap, and proceed to dress.

“Mrs. Sparrowgrass,” said I, contemplatively,
after the grimy machinists had departed, “this
machine is one of the most remarkable evidences
of progress, the ingenuity of man has yet developed.
In this bedstead we see a host of cardinal
virtues made practical by science. To rise early,
one must possess courage, prudence, self-denial,
temperance, and fortitude. The cultivation of
these virtues, necessarily attended with a great
deal of trouble, may now be dispensed with, as this
engine can entirely set aside, and render useless, a
vast amount of moral discipline. I have no doubt,
in a short time we shall see the finest attributes of
the human mind superseded by machinery. Nay,
more, I have very little doubt that, as a preparatory
step in this great progress, we shall have physical
monitors of cast-iron and wheel-work to regulate
the ordinary routine of duty in every family.”

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Mrs. Sparrowgrass said she did not precisely understand
what I meant. “For instance,” said I, in
continuation, “we dine every day; as a general
thing, I mean. Now sometimes we eat too much,
and how easy, how practicable it would be to
regulate our appetites by a banquet-dial. The
subject, having had the superficial area of his
skull, and the cubic capacity of his body worked
out respectively by a licensed craniologist, and by
a licensed coporalogist, gets from each a certificate,
which certificates are duly registered in the county
clerk's office. From the county clerk he receives
a permit, marked, we will say, ten.” “Not ten
pounds, I hope,” said Mrs. S. “No, my dear,”
I replied, “ten would be the average of his
capacity. We will now suppose the chair, in
which the subject is seated at dinner, rests upon a
pendulous platform, over a delicate arrangement
of levers, connected with an upright rod, that runs
through the section of table in front of his plate,
and this rod, we will suppose, is toothed into a
ratchet-wheel, that moves the index of the banquet-dial.
You will see at once, that, as he hangs
balanced in this scale, any absorption of food
would be instantly indicated by the index. All

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then, he is called upon to do, is to watch the dial,
until the hand points to `ten,' and then, stop
eating.” “But,” said Mrs. Sparrowgrass, “suppose
he shouldn't be half through?” “Oh,” said
I, “that would not make any difference. When
the dial says he has had enough, he must quit.”
“But,” said Mrs. Sparrowgrass, “suppose he would
not stop eating?” “Then,” said I, “the proper way
to do would be to inform against him, and have
him brought immediately before a justice of the
peace, and if he did not at once swear that he had
eaten within his limits, fine him, and seize all
the victuals on his premises.” “Oh,” said Mrs. S.,
“you would have a law to regulate it, then?”
“Of course,” said I, “a statute—a statutory provision,
or provisionary act. Then, the principle
once being established, you see how easily and
beautifully we could be regulated by the simplest
motive powers. All the obligations we now owe
to society and to ourselves, could be dispensed
with, or rather transferred to, or vested in, some
superior machine to which we would be accountable
by night and day. Nay, more than that, instead
of sending representatives to legislate for us, how
easy it would be to construct a legislature of bronze

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and wheel-work—an incorruptible legislature. I
would suggest a hydraulic or pneumatic congress,
as being less liable to explode, and more easily
graduated than one propelled by steam simply.
All that would be required of us then would be to
elect a state engineer annually, and he, with the
assistance of a few underlings, could manage the
automata as he pleased.” “I do not see,” replied
Mrs. Sparrowgrass, “how that would be an
improvement upon the present method, from all
I hear.” This unexpected remark of Mrs. S. surprised
me into silence for a moment, but immediately
recovering, I answered that a hydraulic or
pneumatic legislature would at least have this
advantage—it would construct enactments for the
State at, at least, one fifthieth part of the present
expense, and at the same time do the work better
and quicker.

“Now, my dear,” said I, as I wound up the
ponderous machinery with a huge key, “as you
are always an early riser, and as, of course, you
will be up before seven o'clock, I will set the indicator
at that hour, so that you will not be disturbed
by the progress of science. It is getting to
be very cold, my dear, but how beautiful the stars

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are to-night. Look at Orion and the Pleiades!
Intensely lustrous, in the frosty sky.”

The sensations one experiences in lying down
upon a complication of mechanical forces, are
somewhat peculiar, if they are not entirely novel.
I once had the pleasure, for one week, of sleeping
directly over the boiler of a high-pressure Mississippi
steamboat; and, as I knew, in case of a blowup,
I should be the first to hear of it, I composed
my mind as well as I could under the circumstances.
But this reposing upon a bed of statics
and dynamics, with the constant chirping and
crawling of wheel-work at the bed's head, with a
thought now and then of the inexorable iron
elbow below, and an uncertainty as to whether the
clock itself might not be too fast, or to slow,
caused me to be rather reflective and watchful,
than composed and drowsy. Nevertheless, I enjoyed
the lucent stars in their blue depths, and
the midnight moon now tipping the Palisades with
a fringe of silver fire, and was thinking how many
centuries that lovely light had played upon those
rugged ridges of trap and basalt, and so finally
sinking from the reflective to the imaginative, and
from the imaginative to the indistinct, at last

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reached that happy state of half-consciousness,
between half-asleep and asleep, when the clock in
the machine woke up, and suddenly struck eight!
Of course, I knew it was later, but I could not
imagine why it should strike at all, as I presumed
the only time of striking was in the morning, by
way of signal. As Mrs. S. was sound asleep, I
concluded not to say anything to her about it; but
I could not help thinking what an annoyance it
would be if the clock should keep on striking the
hours during the night. In a little while the bedclothes
seemed to droop at the foot of the bed, to
which I did not pay much attention, as I was just
then engaged listening to the drum below, that
seemed to be steadily engaged in winding up its rope,
and preparing for action. Then I felt the upper
part of the patent bedstead rising up, and then I
concluded to jump out, just as the iron elbow began
to utter a cry like unto the cry of a steel katy-did,
and did jump, but was accidentally preceded by
the mattress, one bolster, two pillows, ditto blankets,
a brace of threadbare linen sheets, one coverlid,
the baby, one cradle (over-turned), and Mrs.
Sparrowgrass. To gather up these heterogeneous
materials of comfort required some little time, and,

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in the meanwhile, the bedstead subsided. When
we retired again, and were once more safely protected
from the nipping cold, although pretty well
cooled, I could not help speaking of the perfect
operation of the bedstead in high terms of praise,
although, by some accident, it had fulfilled its
object a little earlier than had been desirable. As
I am very fond of dilating upon a pleasing theme,
the conversation was prolonged until Mrs. Sparrowgrass
got sleepy, and the clock struck nine. Then
we had to turn out again. We had to turn out
every hour during the long watches of the night,
for that wonderful epitome of the age of progress.
When the morning came, we were sleepy enough,
and the next evening we concluded to replace the
“wake-up,” with a common, old-fashioned bedstead.
To be sure, I had made a small mistake
the first night, in not setting the “indicator,” as
well as the index of the dial. But what of that?
Who wants his rest, that precious boon, subjected
to contingencies? When we go to sleep, and say
our prayers, let us wake up according to our
natures, and according to our virtues; some require
more sleep, some less; we are not mere bits
of mechanism after all; who knows what world we

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may chance to wake up in? For my part, I have
determined not to be a humming-top, to be wound
up, and to run down, just like that very interesting
toy, one of the young Sparrowgrassii has just now
left upon my table, minus a string.