CHAPTER VIII

Summary

SO sound were our slumbers, as we lay exposed to the heavenly night wind on the rigid structure that served us for a bed-place in that airy attic, that—despite the watchman's punctilious chronological registrations on the noisy gong, the melodious cantillations of the early vendors of materials for the preparation of the early morning meal, or the rapid accession to the number of those hapless beings who, we could not forbear thinking, must have kept watch over us during the night in order to notify to the outsiders if anything particularly strange presided over or influenced us during the dark hours devoted to rest and peace by themselves, as they crouched down on their hunkers lost in attention — we did not awake until a late hour, when the sun had fairly got above the tops of the houses, throwing his rays in gold and silver gleams, over furrowed tiles and horned gables,—through the verdant foliage of the wide-spreading willows that grew in an adjoining garden, and, in long dazzling white pencils, darted in fitful starts through our windows and played about our bodies like the impaling knives hurled from the steady hand of a Chinese juggler.

We had o'erslept ourselves, and were all the better for it — if entire riddance from weariness and thirst, hunger and scorching, and the substitution of good spirits and contentment in lieu thereof, were to be accepted as guarantees.