nestled, he smote their pillows a shattering blow, loud for the retold preluding quarters, incredibly clanging the number ten.  Then he waited for neighbouring campanili to box the ears of slumber’s votaries in turn; whereupon, under pretence of excessive conscientiousness, or else oblivious of his antecedent, damnable misconduct, or perhaps in actual league and trapdoor conspiracy with the surging goblin hosts beneath us, he resumed his blaring strokes, a sonorous recapitulation of the number; all the others likewise.  It was an alarum fit to warn of Attila or Alaric; and not, simply the maniacal noise invaded the fruitful provinces of sleep like Hun and Vandal, the irrational repetition ploughed the minds of those unhappy somnivolents, leaving them worse than sheared by barbarians, disrupt, as by earthquake, with the unanswerable question to Providence, Why!—­Why twice?

Designing slumberers are such infants.  When they have undressed and stretched themselves, flat, it seems that they have really gone back to their mothers’ breasts, and they fret at whatsoever does not smack of nature, or custom.  The cause of a repetition so senseless in its violence, and so unnecessary, set them querying and kicking until the inevitable quarters recommenced.  Then arose an insurgent rabble in their bosoms, it might be the loosened imps of darkness, urging them to speculate whether the proximate monster about to dole out the eleventh hour in uproar would again forget himself and repeat his dreary arithmetic a second time; for they were unaware of his religious obligation, following the hour of the district, to inform them of the tardy hour of Rome.  They waited in suspense, curiosity enabling them to bear the first crash callously.  His performance was the same.  And now they took him for a crazy engine whose madness had infected the whole neighbourhood.  Now was the moment to fight for sleep in contempt of him, and they began by simulating an entry into the fortress they were to defend, plunging on their pillows, battening down their eyelids, breathing with a dreadful regularity.  Alas! it came to their knowledge that the Bell was in possession and they the besiegers.  Every resonant quarter was anticipated up to the blow, without averting its murderous abruptness; and an executioner Midnight that sounded, in addition to the reiterated quarters, four and twenty ringing hammerstrokes, with the aching pause between the twelves, left them the prey of the legions of torturers which are summed, though not described, in the title of a sleepless night.

From that period the curse was milder, but the victims raged.  They swam on vasty deeps, they knocked at rusty gates, they shouldered all the weapons of black Insomnia’s armoury and became her soldiery, doing her will upon themselves.  Of her originally sprang the inspired teaching of the doom of men to excruciation in endlessness.  She is the fountain of the infinite ocean whereon the exceedingly sensitive soul is tumbled everlastingly, with the diversion of hot pincers to appease its appetite for change.