of eating alone!  Eating my dinner alone,—­let me think of it!  But in they come, and make it absolutely necessary that I should open a bottle of orange; for my meat turns into stone when any one dines with me, if I have not wine.  Wine can mollify stones; then that wine turns into acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters (God bless ’em!  I love some of ’em dearly); and with the hatred, a still greater aversion to their going away.  Bad is the dead sea they bring upon me, choking and deadening; but worse is the deader dry sand they leave me on, if they go before bedtime.  Come never, I would say to these spoilers of my dinner; but if you come, never go!  The fact is, this interruption does not happen very often; but every time it comes by surprise, that present bane of my life, orange wine, with all its dreary stifling consequences, follows.  Evening company I should always like, had I any mornings; but I am saturated with human faces (divine forsooth!) and voices all the golden morning; and five evenings in a week would be as much as I should covet to be in company; but I assure you that is a wonderful week in which I can get two, or one, to myself.  I am never C.L., but always C.L. & Co.  He who thought it not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself!  I forget bed-time; but even there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me.  Once a week, generally some singular evening that, being alone, I go to bed at the hour I ought always to be a-bed, just close to my bed-room window is the club-room of a public-house, where a set of singers—­I take them to be chorus-singers of the two theatres (it must be both of them)—­begin their orgies.  They are a set of fellows (as I conceive) who, being limited by their talents to the burden of the song at the playhouses, in revenge have got the common popular airs by Bishop or some cheap composer, arranged for choruses, that is, to be sang all in chorus,—­at least, I never can catch any of the text of the plain song, nothing but the Babylonish choral howl at the tail on’t, “That fury being quenched,’—­the howl I mean,—­a burden succeeds of shouts and clapping and knocking of the table.  At length over-tasked nature drops under it, and escapes for a few hours into the society of the sweet silent creatures of dreams, which go away with mocks and mows at cockcrow.  And then I think of the words Christabel’s father used (bless me!  I have dipt in the wrong ink) to say every morning by way of variety when he awoke,—­

  “Every knell, the Baron saith,
  Wakes us up to a world of death,”—­