The chamber, as the most private part of the house, was stored with chests and coffers, in which the person who occupied it kept his money, his deeds and private papers, and his other valuables. Margaret Paston, writing from Norwich to her husband about the year 1459, gives a curious account of the preparations for his reception at home. “I have,” she says, “taken the measure in the drawte chamber, there as ye would your coffers and your cowntewery (_supposed to mean a desk for writing_) should be set for the while, and there is no space beside the bed, though the bed were removed to the door, for to set both your board (_table_) and your coffers there, and to have space to go and sit beside; wherefore I have purveyed that ye shall have the same drawte chamber (_withdrawing room--the origin of our name of drawing-room for the salon_) that ye had before, thereat ye shall lye to yourself; and when your gear is removed out of your little house, the door shall be locked, and your bags laid in one of the great coffers, so that they shall be safe, I trust.” The hucches (_hutches_) or chests, and coffers, in the bed-chamber, are frequently mentioned in old writings. The large hutch seems to have been usually placed at the foot of the bed. In one of our preceding cuts (No. 257) we have seen it moved from its place to make a temporary seat before the fire. The cut annexed (No. 261), taken from a manuscript Latin Bible in the National Library in Paris (No. 6829), shows us the hutch in its usual place, and opened so as to expose its contents to our view. It is here evidently filled with money, and the persons who have entered the chamber seem to be plundering it. In a very popular old story, the same in substance as that of Macbeth and his daughters, an old man, on the marriage of his daughter, weakly gives up all his property to the young married pair, trusting to their filial love for his sustenance, and they go on treating him worse and worse, until he is saved from actual destitution by a deception he practises upon them. In one version of the story, given in English verse in a manuscript of the fifteenth century, the father goes to a friend and borrows a large sum of money in gold, which he places in his coffer, and, having invited them to his dwelling, and persuaded them to remain all night, he contrives that early in the morning they shall, as by accident, espy him counting his gold. The unfilial children, who supposed that he had given them all he possessed, were astonished to find him still rich, and were induced, by their covetousness, to treat him better during the rest of his life. The poem describes the old man leaving his bed to count the gold in his chest:--