4.
To share a bedroom with one of these fellows is to
lose one's faith in human nature, for, even after
the most eventful
day, 
there
is no comparing notes with them, no midnight
confidence, no
casting up the balance of the day's pleasure and pain.
They sink, at once, into stupid, heavy slumber,
leaving you to your own mental devices. And they all
snore abominably!
5.
The artificial ways of inducing
sleep are
legion, and are only alike in their ineffectuality.
In Lavengro (or is it Romany Rye?) there is an impossible
character, a victim of insomnia,
who finds that a volume of Wordsworth's poems is the
only sure soporific;
but that was Borrow's malice.
The famous old plan of counting sheep jumping over
a
stile has never served my turn. I have herded
imaginary sheep until they insisted on turning themselves
into white bears or blue pigs, and I defy
any reasonable man to fall asleep while mustering
a herd of cerulean
swine.
