Morning and evening it was our one bugbear, and we would avoid it, as
indeed children generally will, by every artifice which we could employ.
Thus we were in the habit of feigning to be asleep shortly before prayer
time, and would gratefully hear my father tell my mother that it was a
shame to wake us; whereon he would carry us up to bed in a state
apparently of the profoundest slumber when we were really wide awake and
in great fear of detection. For we knew how to pretend to be asleep, but
we did not know how we ought to wake again; there was nothing for it
therefore when we were once committed, but to go on sleeping till we were
fairly undressed and put to bed, and could wake up safely in the dark.
But deceit is never long successful, and we were at last ignominiously
exposed.
It happened one evening that my mother suspected my brother John, and
tried to open his little hands which were lying clasped in front of him.
Now my brother was as yet very crude and inconsistent in his theories
concerning sleep, and had no conception what a real sleeper would do
under these circumstances. Fear deprived him of his powers of
reflection, and he thus unfortunately concluded that because sleepers, so
far as he had observed them, were always motionless, therefore they must
be rigid and incapable of motion; and indeed that any movement, under any
circumstances (for from his earliest childhood he liked to carry his
theories to their legitimate conclusion), would be physically impossible
for one who was really sleeping; forgetful, oh! unhappy one, of the
flexibility of his own body on being carried up stairs, and, more unhappy
still, ignorant of the art of waking.
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