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Updated: June 9, 2025
As he had been for a time accustomed to wear nightcaps, his handkerchief would not keep down over his ears, so that his hair in the morning was all tumbled pell-mell about his face and whitened with the feathers of the pillow, whose strings came untied during the night.
Long ere this moment of our embarkation the wide stone street facing the water had become suddenly deserted. The curious-eyed heads and the cotton nightcaps had been swallowed up in the hollows of the dark, little windows.
The last evening of his stay, Derues went up to his room, broke open the box which contained his clothes, turned over everything it contained, examined the clothes, and discovering two new cotton nightcaps, raised a cry which brought up the household.
The mere sight of it made everybody ill, and its former admirers had nothing but curses for it now. Unhappily, nothing they could say or do made it any smaller; still formidable, it was a frightful joke for those miserable mortals. Most of them buried their heads in their pillows, drew their nightcaps over their eyes, and lay in bed all day to shut out the sight of it.
What actually passed in her own mind did not transpire, but she appealed to the first gentleman as being the only one who could throw light upon the subject; when, lo and behold! as soon as his head appeared, in answer to the hasty summons, the three nightcaps appeared at the same time upon it, one being dragged over the other, much to the amusement not only of those present, but also of those who long after heard the tale.
"Don't care if I do." He dropped his tumbler to the floor. "Hang it up, Charley, glass and all. Hang up this gentleman's nightcaps my account. Gentleman asks me home to his house, I'll hang him I'll get him hung, well, fix it to suit yourself, every time!"
From this, all unmarried men, who have attained a certain age, are called, in Denmark, "pepper gentry;" and this must be remembered by all those who wish to understand the story. These "pepper gentlemen," or, as they are called in England, "old bachelors," are often made a butt of ridicule; they are told to put on their nightcaps, draw them over their eyes, and go to sleep.
We always stay until the last minute, and then we slip on our white nightcaps, so fluffy and light and soft they are, and lo! some day we are gone, no one knows where but the wind; and he carries us off in his arms, for we are too tired to walk; and then we rest until the next year, when we are bright and early at our task again."
It was exactly the kind of elfish phrase to which Browning had, it must always be remembered, a quite unconquerable attraction. The notion of a town of sleep, where men and women walked about in nightcaps, a nation of somnambulists, was the kind of thing that Browning in his heart loved better than Paradise Lost.
It was during those seven weeks, some time after this, that poor Madam Daun, going to a Levee at Schonbrunn one day, had her carriage half filled with symbolical nightcaps, successively flung in upon her by the Vienna people; symbolical; in lieu of Slashing Articles, and Newspapers the best Instructors, which they as yet have not.
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