Bed

a place to sleep. If a person works in one place, eats in another, and sleeps in a third, the place of his bed is his home or legal residence. We are so accustomed to think of a bed as consisting of a bedstead, springs, a mattress, sheets, pillows, and blankets or coverlets, that we hardly realize how the great majority of people sleep. There are still tribes of mankind that lie in lairs like wild beasts. The traveler with a dog team in Eskimo land, sleeps in a fur bag and hood. He is able to lie down in the shelter of a snowbank anywhere. The Persian sleeps on an oriental rug; the little brown Jap lies on a piece of matting with a wooden block--a short log of bamboo--for a pillow; the Russian peasant places his mattress on the top of a huge earthenware stove; the well-to-do German sleeps alone in a narrow feather bed with a light, downy, feather mattress to cover him. The Romans considered the introduction of feather beds a sign of luxury and an indication that the nation was going to ruin. They first taught the rude inhabitants of Britain to sew up the leaves and hair of their beds in ticks. In the time of Francis I the French bed of state was so high that it required a stepladder. The uncorrupted American Indian slept between fur robes; the Kentucky settler made a bunk or platform of poles in one corner of the cabin. In this he piled beech and oak leaves and covered them with furs, making a bed fit for royalty. The woodsman of the north gathers the ends of spruce boughs and arranges them, tips upward, to form a fragrant bed. Wrapped in his blanket, he sleeps a sleep unknown to the inhabitant of the city. The lumberman constructs board bunks half filled with hay, on which he spreads his blankets. In the Gulf States, the bedstead, usually with four high posts, is still protected by a rectangular canopy to exclude insects. Of late, bedsteads of enameled iron, vermin proof, have come into favor. Hair mattresses are preferred to feathers because they afford better ventilation. See Furniture