It is Petronius, the
unprincipled scoundrel, who is uncording a bed, dragging remorselessly
through innumerable holes the long rope whose doleful wail came near
giving me an epilepsy. My savage lets loose the dogs of war. Petronius
would fain defend himself by declaring that it is morning. I
indignantly deny it. He produces his watch. A fig for his watch! I
stake my consciousness against twenty watches, and go to bed again; but
Sleep, angry goddess, once repulsed, returns no more. The dawn comes up
the sky and confirms the scorned watch. The golden daggers of the
morning prick in under my eyelids, and Petronius introduces himself
upon the scene once more to announce, that, if I don't wish to be
corded up myself, I must abdicate that bed. The threat does not terrify
me. Indeed, nothing at the moment seems more inviting than to be corded
up and let alone; but duty still binds me to life, and, assuring
Petronius that the just law will do that service for him, if he does
not mend his ways, I slowly emerge again into the world,--the dreary,
chaotic world,--the world that is never at rest.
And there is hurrying to and fro, and a clang of many voices, and the
clatter of much crockery, and a lifting, and balancing, and battering
against walls and curving around corners, and sundry contusions, and a
great waste of expletives, and a loading of wagons, and a driving of
patient oxen back and forth with me generally on the top of the load,
steadying a basket of eggs with one foot, keeping a tin can of
something from upsetting with the other, and both arms stretched around
a very big and very square picture-frame that knocks against my nose or
my chin every time the cart goes over a stone or drops into a rut, and
the wind threatening to blow my hat off, and blowing it off, and my
"back-hair" tumbling down,--and the old house is at last despoiled.
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