We can imagine her (if such an intrusive fancy is not impertinent after one hundred and eighty years), attired in her night-hood and her “flowered calico night-rayle with high collared neck,” climbing wearily upon a chair and thence to the mountainous bed with its dingy pillow. The fashion of wearing “immoderate great rayles” had been prohibited by law in Massachusetts in 1634, but the garment mentioned must have been some kind of a loose gown worn in the day-time, for we cannot fancy that even the meddlesome interference and aspiring ambition for omnipotence of those Puritan magistrates would make them dare to attempt to control what kind of a nightgown a woman should wear. Here is another vivid description of a night’s lodging, where her room was shared, as was the country custom of that time (and indeed for many years later), by the men who had journeyed with her:-- Arriving at my apartment found it to be a little Lento Chamber furnished amongst other Rubbish with a High Bedd and a Low one, a Long Table, a Bench and a Bottomless chair. Little Miss went to scratch up my Kennell which Russelled as if shee’d bin in the Barn amongst the Husks, and supose such was the contents of the tickin--nevertheless being exceeding weary-down I laid my poor Carkes (never more tired) and found my Covering as scanty as my Bed was hard. Anon I heard another Russelling noise in Ye Room--called to know the matter--Little Miss said shee was making a bed for the men; who, when they were in Bed complained their leggs lay out of it by reason of its shortness--my poor bones complained bitterly not being used to such Lodgings, and so did the man who was with us; and poor I made but one Grone, which was from the time I went to bed to the time I Riss, which was about three in the morning, Setting up by the Fire till Light. The word “lento,” or “lean to,” was sometimes called “linter,” and you will still hear old-fashioned or aged country-people use the word. The “lean-to” was the rear portion of a form of house peculiar to New England, which was two stories high in front, with a roof which sloped down from a steep gable to a very low single story at the rear. Madam Sarah speaks with some surprise throughout her travels of the height of the beds, so it is evident that very towering beds were not in high fashion in Boston in 1704, in spite of the exceeding tall four-posters that have descended to us from our ancestors, and which surely no one could mount in modern days without a chair as an accessory. Even a chair was not always a sufficient stepping-block by the bedsides that Madam Sarah found, for she thus writes: “He invited us to his house, and shewed me two pair of stairs, viz, one up the loft, and tother up the Bedd, which was as hard as it was high, and warmed with a hott stone at the foot.”