Chapter X

., Part First, how still the garden becomes as evening comes on. The flies, and bees, and bugs, and birds have gone to rest, to get repaired for the next day; so, too, have the larger animals. But it is curious that some animals are busy in the night, and take their sleep in the day. It is so with the owl and the bat. The katydid, you know, does not begin its noise till evening. I suppose that it sleeps in the daytime.

Those people that stay up late at night, and do not get up early in the morning, make a great mistake. They do not take the right time for sleeping. They ought not to turn night into day, as bats, and owls, and katydids do, for they are not made for it.

[Sidenote: Why merely keeping still will not answer.]

When you are tired and need sleep, the trouble is not merely in the muscles. If it was, then keeping still merely, without sleeping, would answer. But the brain and nerves need repairing as well as the muscles. But as long as you are seeing, and hearing, and feeling, the nerves are kept too busy to be repaired well; and as long as your mind keeps thinking, the brain does not get thoroughly repaired. So, then, merely keeping still will only repair the muscles; and sleep is needed to repair the brain and the nerves.

[Sidenote: Dreaming.]

You know that when you dream very much you are not as much refreshed as when you sleep soundly. What is the reason? It is because that when you dream the mind is not wholly at rest, and works the brain, so that it is not thoroughly repaired.

[Sidenote: The winter sleep of some animals.]

There is another kind of sleep into which some animals go. It is a very long sleep. It lasts all winter. Great numbers of such animals as frogs, bats, flies, and spiders, go into by-places in the fall to sleep till spring comes. Many of the birds do this.

It is a deeper sleep than that which animals go into at night. It is a different kind of sleep. In the sleep at night the blood keeps moving, and the animal breathes; but in this winter sleep there is no breathing, and the blood stops circulating. All is as still as death. But there is life there, just as I told you, in Part First, there is life in the seed, and in the trees that look so dead in winter. It is life asleep. The warmth of spring wakes up again the life in these animals, as it does the life in the trees. The blood then begins to circulate in them, as the sap does in the trees, and they come out from their hiding-places.

[Sidenote: The long sleep of a toad.]

I have said that this sleep which some animals go into lasts through the winter. It may be made to last longer than this. Some frogs were once kept in this winter sleep for over three years in an ice-house; and then, on being brought out into the warm air, revived and hopped about as lively as ever. We do not know how much longer they might have been kept in this sleep. You remember that in Part First,