I have marveled at the ease with which Othello strangled Desdemona. Further thought gives it explanation. The poor girl was half suffocated before he laid hands on her. I find also a solution of Macbeth's enigmatic speech, "Wicked dreams abuse the curtain'd sleep." Any dream that could get at you through the circumvallation of glass, brocade, cotton and feathers could be no better than a quadruplicated house-breaker, compounded out of desperate villainies.
Reader, have you ever purchased a pair of pajamas in London? This is homely stuff I write, yet there's pathos in it. That jaunty air betokens the beginning of your search before question and reiteration have dulled your spirits. Later, there will be less sparkle in your eye. What! Do not the English wear pajamas? Does not the sex that is bifurcated by day keep by night to its manly bifurcation? Is not each separate leg swathed in complete divorcement from its fellow? Or, womanish, do they rest in the common dormitory of a shirt _de nuit_? The Englishman _does_ wear pajamas, but the word with him takes on an Icelandic meaning. They are built to the prescription of an Esquimo. They are woolly, fuzzy and the width of a finger thick. If I were a night-watchman, "doom'd for a certain term to walk the night," I should insist on English pajamas to keep me awake. If Saint Sebastian, who, I take it, wore sackcloth for the glory of his soul, could have lighted on the pair of pajamas that I bought on Oxford Circus, his halo would have burned the brighter.
Just how the feathery and billowy nights of our great-grandparents were changed into the present is too deep for explanation. Perhaps Annie left a door or window open--such neglect fitting with her other heedlessness--and notwithstanding this means of entry, it was found in the morning that no sprite or ooph had got in to pinch the noses of the sleepers. At least, there was no evidence of such a visitation, unless the snoring that abounded all the night did proceed from the pinching of the nose (the nasal orifice being so clamped betwixt the forefinger and the thumb of these devilish sprites that the breath was denied its proper channel). Unless snoring was so caused, it is clear that no ooph had clambered through the window.