VILLAGE MINEES. 153 



am ignorant. The spotted-leaf orchis flowers, which 

 grow in moist and shady meads, lifting their purplish 

 heads among the early spring grass, are called by the 

 children " gran'fer goslings." To express extreme lack 

 — as of money — they will say their purses are as bare 

 as a toad is of feathers. 



In these days it is the fashion to praise mattresses 

 and to depreciate the feather-bed. Nothing so healthy 

 as a mattress, nothing so good in every way. Mat- 

 tresses are certainly cheaper, and there it ends. I 

 maintain that no modern invention approaches the 

 feather-bed. People try to persuade me to eat the 

 coarsest part of flour — actually the rejected part — and 

 to sleep on a mattress ; that is to say, to go back about 

 twenty thousand years in civilization. But I decline. 

 Having some acquaintance with wheat, I prefer the 

 fine white flour, which is the very finest of all the 

 products of the earth; having slept on all sorts of 

 beds, sitting on a pole, tying on turf, leaning against 

 a tree, and so forth, no one will ever persuade me 

 that any couch is equal to a feather-bed. But should 

 any desire a yet cheaper mattress than those ad- 

 vertised, I can put them in the way to obtain it. 

 Among my hamlet Californians it is not unusual 

 to find beds in use stuffed with the " bucks " of oats, 

 i.e. the chaff*. Like the backwoodsmen, they have to 

 make shift with what they can get. Their ancestors 

 steamed their arrows so as to soften the wood, when 

 it was bound to a rigid rod and hung up in the 

 chimney to dry perfectly straight. The modern 

 cottager takes a stout stick and boils it in the pot 

 till it becomes flexible. He then bends it into the 



