VILLAGE MINEHS. 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 civilizatioa 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, lying 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 " hucks " 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 



