The following morning at daybreak when I awoke, a noisy cadence¹, to which I was unaccustomed, fell upon my ears; the neighboring weaver² had already commenced, even with the dawn, to work his ancient loom³, and the musical to and fro of its shuttle had roused me. Then after the first drowsy⁴, dreamy moment I remembered, with overwhelming joy, that I was at my uncle's in the south; that this was the morning of the first day; that I had before me the prospect⁵ of a whole summer of out-of-door life and wildest liberty—had August and September, two months that at present pass as quickly as if they were but two days, but which then seemed of a fairly respectable duration. With a feeling of rapture⁶, after I had wholly shaken off my sleep, I came into a full consciousness of myself and the realities of my life; I felt “joy at my waking.”  
The preceding winter I had read a story of the Indians of the Great Lakes, and one thing in it had impressed me so deeply that I always remembered it: an old Indian chief, whose daughter was pining away because of her love for a white man, had finally consented to give her to the alien so that she might once more feel “joy at her waking.”
 
Joy at her waking! Indeed, for some time I had myself noticed that the moment of waking is always the one in which I had the most distinct and vivid impression of joy or sorrow; and it is then, at the waking hour, that one finds it so particularly painful to be without joy; my first little sorrows and remorses, my anxieties about the future, were the things that usually obtruded⁷ themselves cruelly—however the feeling of sadness vanished very quickly in those days.
 
At a later time I had very gloomy and sad awakenings. And there are times now when I have moments of terrifying clearness of vision during which I seem to see, if I may so express it, into the depths of life; it is at such moments that life presents itself to me without those pleasing mirages⁸ that during the day still delude⁹ me; during those moments I appear to have a more vivid realization¹⁰ of the rapid flight of the years, the crumbling¹¹ away of all that I endeavor to hold to, I almost realize the final unimaginable nothingness, I see the bottomless pit of death, near at hand, no longer in any way disguised.
 
But that morning I had a joyful¹² awaking, and unable to remain quietly in bed, I rose immediately. So impatient was I to be out that I scarcely took time to ask myself where I should begin my first day's round of visits.
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