Fig. 2.
The form of wooden bedstead ([Fig. 3]), which could easily be copied at all events in its general idea, by any village carpenter, would be exceedingly pretty and original for a young girl’s bedroom. It is intended to be of oak with side rails which are to pass through carved posts, and be held by wooden pins, as are also the end rails. For durability as well as simplicity this design leaves nothing to be desired, and it can be made in almost any hard wood, whilst every year would only add to its intrinsic worth. How many of us mothers have taken special delight in preparing a room for our daughters when they return from school “for good”—when they leave off learning lessons out of books, and try, with varied success, to learn and apply those harder lessons, which have to be learned without either books or teachers.
What sumptuous room in after years ever affords the deep delight of the sense of ownership which attends the first awakening of a girl in a room of her very own? and it is a vivid recollection of this pure delight of one’s own bygone girl-days which prompts us to do our best to furbish up ever so homely a room for our eldest daughter. If a pretty, fresh carpet is unattainable, then let us have bare boards, with rugs, or skins, or whatever is available. Necessity developes ingenuity, and ingenuity goes a long way. I never learned the meaning of either word until I found myself very far removed from shops, and forced to invent or substitute the materials wherewith to carry out my own little decorative ideas.
Fig. 3.
Some very lofty rooms seem to require a more furnished style of bed, and for these stately sleeping-places it may be well to have sweeping curtains of silk or satin gathered up quite or almost at the ceiling, and falling in ample straight folds on either side of a wide, low bedstead. They would naturally be kept out of the way by slender arms or brackets some six or eight feet from the floor, which would prevent the curtains from clinging too closely round the bed, and give the right lines to the draperies. But, speaking individually, it is never to such solemn sleeping-places as these, that my fancy reverts when, weary and travel-stained, and in view of some homely wayside room, one thinks by way of contrast, of other and prettier bedrooms. No, it is rather to simple, lovely little nests of chintz and muslin, with roses inside and outside the wall, with low chairs and writing-table, sofa and toilet all in the same room—a bedroom and bower in one. Edgar Allan Poe declares that to
“slumber aright You must sleep in just such a bed.”
But he only says it of the last bed of all. Without going so far as that, I can declare that I have slumbered “aright” in extraordinary beds, in extraordinary places, on tables, and under them (that was to be out of the way of being walked upon), on mats, on trunks, on all sorts of wonderful contrivances. I slept once very soundly on a piece of sacking stretched between two bullock trunks, though my last waking thought was an uneasy misgiving as to the durability of the frail-looking iron pins at each end of this yard of canvas, which fitted into corresponding eyelet holes in the trunks. I know the uneasiness of mattresses stuffed with chopped grass, and the lumpiness of those filled by amateur hands with wool—au naturel. Odours also are familiar unto me, the most objectionable being, perhaps, that arising from a feather bed in a Scotch inn, and from a seaweed mattress in an Irish hotel, in which I should imagine many curious specimens of marine zoology had been entombed by mistake.
But there is one thing I want to say most emphatically, and that is that I have met with greater dirt and discomfort, worse furniture, more comfortless beds (I will say nothing of the vileness of the food!), and a more general air of primitive barbarism in inns and lodgings in out-of-the-way places in Great Britain and Ireland, than I have ever come across in any colony. I know half-a-dozen places visited by heaps of tourists every year, within half-a-dozen hours’ journey of London, which are far behind, in general comfort and convenience, most of the roadside inns either in New Zealand or Natal. It is very inexplicable why it should be so, but it is a fact. It is marvellous that there should often be such dirt and discomfort and general shabbiness and dinginess under circumstances which, compared with colonial difficulties, including want of money, would seem all that could be desired.