Flat feather bolsters were used on these beds, the ends of the slips hanging down, and ornamented with eyelet embroidery or netted lace.
Nowadays the coverlets are frequently used as portieres, and they are quite artistic and handsome for this purpose.
The word tester is of curious origin, coming down to us from the Norman testere, a head covering. The English speedily contracted this to “tester,” which name they gave to helmets. Chaucer speaks of “the shieldes brighte, testers and trappures” of the Crusaders, and later the word came to apply to the canopy placed over the bed to support the draperies which protected the sleeper from wandering draughts, so plentiful in those old stone castles. Sir Horace Walpole writes early in the eighteenth century of a visit to a friend’s seat, where he found “no tester to the bed and slept with the saddles and portmanteaus heaped on me to keep off the cold.” Our colonists brought the tester-bed with them, but in this balmy climate they were able to dispense with the curtains; they did not, however, leave off the mountainous feather bed, which necessitated the aid of “a pair of steps” to reach its downy heights. By its side was placed the candle-stand, with its brass candle-stick and snuffers; and in the days “when grandma danced the minuet” with grandpa, brave in satin knee-breeches and buckled shoon, they dreamed of no possibility of rest more hygienic than that obtained on the home-cured goose feathers, with the home-spun sheets, blankets and counterpanes which covered their tester-beds.
AUNT JANE’S MOCKING-BIRD
By Alma L. Stewart
“De sassy little deb’l, if dat jes’ don’t beat anything I eber seed,” Aunt Jane was saying, as she vigorously knocked the well-worn breadtray against the windowsill, if a hole two by four cut in the side of the little log cabin can be said to have a window sill, to dislodge the fragments of dough left from the preparation of the morning meal. After a few more well-intended knocks she dried the tray and hung it and the dishcloth on their own nail back of the small stove, and grasping the corner of her apron she dried her hands and was mopping her face as she turned and saw me in the doorway.
“Laws a-massy, Missus, whar’d yer drap from? Come in, dat is, ef yer can find de way wid so much trash strowin’ roun’.
“Git out in de yard, niggers,” she said to a group of dirty, half-naked little negroes, who were investigating the mysteries of a sardine can under the table. In their effort to obey their seemingly irate mother, they nearly upset the rickety old table, one leg of which was propped up with a broken brick that Aunt Jane had brought from the sidewalk of the town four miles away for that very purpose. “Bricks is sca’ce in dese parts,” she had said to a neighbor, who had “ax’d her what in de world she wuz gwin’ter do wid dat brick?” And so the vanquished pickaninnies with timorous backward glances, disappeared, rubbing their heads as they went.
“Viney, do git dat cher fer Miss Annie. Jes’ lay dem clothes on de bed. My soul alibe, Missus, dese here niggers nearly runs me ’stracted.” And she turned to me with the air of one whose last hope was gone.
But I knew how to take Aunt Jane’s moods, for she would have torn anyone else literally to pieces had they dared to intimate anything detrimental to the “life and charuc’ter of her chillun.” And so I seated myself comfortably in Aunt Jane’s only rocker, which she declared no one ever sat in “’cept her white folks.” Meanwhile she busied herself with the pots and pans of the stove, talking as fast as she could, asking me a hundred questions about the members of my family. I had come to see her about taking my laundry. My present washwoman had rubbed all the buttons off my husband’s shirts, and insisted on starching the nether parts of them, while my own cambric ones and linen dresses were as limber as Aunt Jane’s proverbial dishrag. Aunt Jane had been in our family when a girl and I felt that I could depend upon her.