own country, we regret to say, that a really
good brd is rarely to be met with— except in
private houses whore people have taken
especial pains to provide them; but, even there, it
appears to us that very few know what a really
good bed is. In tho newest hotels, on the
magnificent scale which are now becoming one
of the many phases in which joint-stock limited-
liability companies are so abounding, care has
been taken to provide excellent beds; but in the
older hotels, especially provincial ones, nothing
can be worse, and this remark applies also to
the ordinary lodging-houses and furnished
apartments of the watering-places and of London
itself. The great idea is that there must
be a feather-bed of various degrees of goodness
and of feather supply— some of down, in
which you sink into its depths and lie sweltering
through the night; some of meagre dimensions,
stale and musty materials, with the
points of the feather-quills running into you,
and the feather squeezed by the lapse of years
into hard knots and balls. You dislike a
feather-bed— the weather is sultry — and you order
the feather-bed to be put below the mattress for
your own particular benefit; and what a
mattress! hard, lumpy, uneven, in pits and knobs,
fusty, with anything but wholesome wool or
horsehair. Your rest is destroyed, your limbs
ache in the morning, and you return to the
feather-bed in despair. The new hotels, sparing
no expense, as the company's capital pays
for all, have, as we observed, excellent beds.
Usually they consist of a substratum of spiral
springs, with a light horsehair thin mattress
over them. They are very elastic; they
are very comfortable, and very wholesome.
The objections are, that, as the power
of the spring remains the same for all comers,
they give the feeling of being in a boat
to light bodies, and your eighteen or twenty
stone people's weight often smashes the springs,
and the next comer finds an uneasy couch, with
a deplorable and an irregular hollow. The best
bed we know of is a palliasse of straw as
the basis, a wool mattress, well carded, and
regularly re-carded once a year, upon the
palliasse, and a light horsehair mattress over that.
In France there are no feather-beds— only
mattresses, very soft and elastic, of carded
wool; but the objection to them is, that they
are hot to sleep upon in warm weather. In
England, amongst the middling and lower classes,
feather-beds constantly are the rule. A working
man or a servant, when he is " about to
marry," considers a feather-bed one of the grand
articles of furniture to be provided; and though
when the expenses increase, and poverty comes,
it is pretty sure to be sent to the pawnbroker's,
still it is one of the last things to go— the
bedstead generally is sent before the feather-bed,
and the family reposes on the floor. Amongst
the higher classes feather-beds are now
disappearing fast; medical authority pronounces them
unwholesome for children, and children are
cared for sufficiently to ensure that their beds
should be what are most suitable. As these
children grow up, they keep to the habits of
their childhood; and when their own houses and
establishments are provided, feather-beds are
avoided.

It is curious to notice the habits of different
nations in regard to beds. However dress, food,
manners, cooking, political conditions, may vary
in other countries, the beds differ as notably as
anything does. In Eastern nations the bed is
often nothing but a carpet, and is carried about
and spread in any convenient spot, and the tired
native lies down in his clothes. We remember
a child who used to be puzzled with those
miracles of our Saviour, who, in restoring an
impotent man, directed him to take up his bed
and walk— his idea of a bed consisting in a
four-post bedstead, with its palliasse, mattress,
and feather-bed, besides blankets, sheets, and
pillows. But even in very cold countries the
beds are closely allied to the Eastern carpet.
In taking a furnished house in Russia, on
inquiring for the servants' bedrooms and beds,
which did not appear in the inventory on our
surveying the apartments, it comes out that the
Russian servants are in the habit of lying
anywhere— in the passages, on the floors, on the
mats at the room-doors, or even on the
carpets in the sitting-rooms — generally as near as
possible to the stoves in the winter season.
The emperor himself sleeps on a leathern sofa
in a sitting-room, lying down in a dressing-
gown, but not removing his under-clothing.
But in Russia the houses are kept so warm, by
the system of stoves through the walls, that
much bed-covering is no more required in winter
than during the heats of summer.

In Germany the construction of the beds
gives one the impression that the Germans do
not know what it is to lie down. The bedstead
is a short wooden case; there is a mattress
extending from head to foot, but so formed that
at the half way the upper end is made to slope
at an angle of considerable elevation, and upon
this are two enormous down pillows, which
reach from the head of the bed to the half way
down to the feet; consequently the occupant of
the bed lies at an angle of at least forty-five
degrees, and is nearly in a sitting position all night.
In some parts of Germany there are no blankets:
there is a sheet to lie on, and another over it,
which is tacked to a quilt wadded with down;
and this is the entire covering, with the exception
of a sort of bed, a thick eider-down quilt,
but not quilted, which is placed on the top, and
which, unless the sleeper is very quiet in
his sleep, is usually found on the floor in the
morning. In hot weather there is no medium;
either a sheet is the only covering, or one of
these over-warm eider-downs.

As the traveller proceeds more and more
northerly, the size of the beds seems to decrease,
and the covering provided to be less adapted
to the changes of the seasons. In the palace
of the King of Prussia, at Babelsburg, near
Potsdam, the bed for his majesty is as small
and as simple as that of any of his subjects;
but we observed a Scotch shepherd's plaid laid