When any startling piece of war-news comes, it keeps repeating itself in our minds in spite of all we can do.  The same trains of thought go tramping round in circle through the brain, like the supernumeraries that make up the grand army of a stage-show.  Now, if a thought goes round through the brain a thousand times in a day, it will have worn as deep a track as one which has passed through it once a week for twenty years.  This accounts for the ages we seem to have lived since the twelfth of April last, and, to state it more generally, for that ex post facto operation of a great calamity, or any very powerful impression, which we once illustrated by the image of a stain spreading backwards from the leaf of life open before as through all those which we have already turned.

Blessed are those who can sleep quietly in times like these!  Yet, not wholly blessed, either; for what is more painful than the awaking from peaceful unconsciousness to a sense that there is something wrong, we cannot at first think what,—­and then groping our way about through the twilight of our thoughts until we come full upon the misery, which, like some evil bird, seemed to have flown away, but which sits waiting for us on its perch by our pillow in the gray of the morning?

The converse of this is perhaps still more painful.  Many have the feeling in their waking hours that the trouble they are aching with is, after all, only a dream,—­if they will rub their eyes briskly enough and shake themselves, they will awake out of it, and find all their supposed grief is unreal.  This attempt to cajole ourselves out of an ugly fact always reminds us of those unhappy flies who have been indulging in the dangerous sweets of the paper prepared for their especial use.

Watch one of them.  He does not feel quite well,—­at least, he suspects himself of indisposition.  Nothing serious,—­let us just rub our fore-feet together, as the enormous creature who provides for us rubs his hands, and all will be right.  He rubs them with that peculiar twisting movement of his, and pauses for the effect.  No! all is not quite right yet.  Ah! it is our head that is not set on just as it ought to be.  Let us settle that where it should be, and then we shall certainly be in good trim again.  So he pulls his head about as an old lady adjusts her cap, and passes his fore-paw over it like a kitten washing herself.  Poor fellow!  It is not a fancy, but a fact, that he has to deal with.  If he could read the letters at the head of the sheet, he would see they were Fly-Paper.—­So with us, when, in our waking misery, we try to think we dream!  Perhaps very young persons may not understand this; as we grow older, our waking and dreaming life run more and more into each other.

Another symptom of our excited condition is seen in the breaking up of old habits.  The newspaper is as imperious as a Russian Ukase; it will be had, and it will be read.  To this all else must give place.  If we must go out at unusual hours to get it, we shall go, in spite of after-dinner nap or evening somnolence.  If it finds us in company, it will not stand on ceremony, but cuts short the compliment and the story by the divine right of its telegraphic dispatches.