“Drunkenness begins in the infant in swaddling clothes.  What useful trouble Bishop Tillotson gives himself, thundering against excessive drinking.  What an odious draught of wind!  And then my stove is old.  It allows puffs of smoke to escape enough to give you trichiasis.  One has the inconvenience of cold, and the inconvenience of fire.  One cannot see clearly.  That being over there abuses my hospitality.  Well, I have not been able to distinguish the animal’s face yet.  Comfort is wanting here.  By Jove!  I am a great admirer of exquisite banquets in well closed rooms.  I have missed my vocation.  I was born to be a sensualist.  The greatest of stoics was Philoxenus, who wished to possess the neck of a crane, so as to be longer in tasting the pleasures of the table.  Receipts to-day, naught.  Nothing sold all day.  Inhabitants, servants, and tradesmen, here is the doctor, here are the drugs.  You are losing your time, old friend.  Pack up your physic.  Every one is well down here.  It’s a cursed town, where every one is well!  The skies alone have diarrhoea—­what snow!  Anaxagoras taught that the snow was black; and he was right, cold being blackness.  Ice is night.  What a hurricane!  I can fancy the delight of those at sea.  The hurricane is the passage of demons.  It is the row of the tempest fiends galloping and rolling head over heels above our bone-boxes.  In the cloud this one has a tail, that one has horns, another a flame for a tongue, another claws to its wings, another a lord chancellor’s paunch, another an academician’s pate.  You may observe a form in every sound.  To every fresh wind a fresh demon.  The ear hears, the eye sees, the crash is a face.  Zounds!  There are folks at sea—­that is certain.  My friends, get through the storm as best you can.  I have enough to do to get through life.  Come now, do I keep an inn, or do I not?  Why should I trade with these travellers?  The universal distress sends its spatterings even as far as my poverty.  Into my cabin fall hideous drops of the far-spreading mud of mankind.  I am given up to the voracity of travellers.  I am a prey—­the prey of those dying of hunger.  Winter, night, a pasteboard hut, an unfortunate friend below and without, the storm, a potato, a fire as big as my fist, parasites, the wind penetrating through every cranny, not a halfpenny, and bundles which set to howling.  I open them and find beggars inside.  Is this fair?  Besides, the laws are violated.  Ah! vagabond with your vagabond child!  Mischievous pick-pocket, evil-minded abortion, so you walk the streets after curfew?  If our good king only knew it, would he not have you thrown into the bottom of a ditch, just to teach you better?  My gentleman walks out at night with my lady, and with the glass at fifteen degrees of frost, bare-headed and bare-footed.  Understand that such things are forbidden.  There are rules and regulations, you lawless wretches.  Vagabonds are punished, honest folks who have houses are guarded