Why a sofa, say you? Because no one who has not one in a nursery can know how invaluable such a possession is. Children have often tiny ailments that are not bad enough for bed, and bed should never be resorted to in the daytime unless positively necessary. An aching head, a ‘stuffy’ cold, all these are much more bearable if a broad cosy sofa is available, while an occasional rest for a growing child is a great thing always to be able to secure; a child, recollect, who ever complains of being ‘so tired’ being a child that requires watching, _not_ coddling, and to whom that sofa may prove little else but salvation. This need not cost much either, for the beau-ideal of a nursery sofa is one that no fashionable person would look at now; it stands square on its feet, has a high square back and arms, no springs, only two big square cushions, and has some pillows of soft feathers, to mitigate the severity of the details, which--O shades of all my long-lost youth!--were the best things I ever had in all my life for ammunition, either at the sacking of a town or the defence of some Scottish castle; when, arrayed in a broad plaid sash brought back from Scotland by some one who knew how I adored the ‘Days of Bruce,’ and other works of the kind, the very names of which I have forgotten, I became in a moment Sir William Wallace himself, and was happier then, I dare say, than I have ever been since. For there is another aspect to the nursery sofa that is not to be despised, besides its great use in illness or fatigue; it is a never-failing source of inspiration for regularly good games--it is a fortress, a whole city, a ship at sea, an elephant--in fact, anything any one likes to imagine it is. The broad square cushions are rafts to put off to sea in when the ship itself is destroyed; they are fire-escapes or desert islands, or icebergs at will; while no one who has not had them can possibly tell the joy it is to throw the soft pillows about, when nurse has put away the ornaments on the chimneypiece, and retired with her chair and her baby into the next room, where she is near enough to check unseemly revels, and yet not too near to come in for a share of the fray, which waxes fast and furious when the sofa and all its capabilities are fully appreciated, and where the coverings are warranted not to hurt.