boxes, so short that any person who happened to be above five feet high must absolutely sit up all night supported by pillows; and this, in fact, is the way in which the Germans sleep." I think this is a statement that will be as surprising to any German who reads it as the statements made by Germans about England have often been to me. It is true, however, that tall people do find the old-fashioned German bedsteads short; and it is true that the big square downy pillows are supported by a wedge-shaped bolster called a _Keilkissen_. But the _Plumeau_ is what the German loves, and the Briton hates above all things: the mountain of down or feathers that tumbles off on cold nights and stays on on hot ones. You hate it all the year round, because in winter it is too short and in summer it is an oppression. Sometimes the sheet is buttoned to it, and then though you are a traveller you are less than ever content. At the best you never succumb to its attractions. Every spring the good German housewife takes her maid and her _Plumeaux_ to a cleaner and sits there while the feathers are purified by machinery and returned to their bags. In this way she makes sure of getting back her own feathers both in quality and quantity. Except for the _Plumeaux_ and the want of a dressing-table and proper mirror, an ordinary German bedroom is very comfortable and always very clean. However plain it is you can use it partly as a sitting-room, because a sofa and a good sized table in front of it are considered an indispensable part of its furniture. When Germans come to England and have to live in lodgings or poorly furnished inns, the bedrooms seem to them most comfortless and ill provided. The poor Idealist who lived as an exile in London in the early Victorian age describes her forlorn room with nothing in it but a "colossal" bed, a washstand, and a chest of drawers, and though she does not describe them, you who know London from that side can see the half-dirty honey-combed counterpane, the untempting cotton sheets, the worn uncleanly carpet, the grained or painted furniture with doors and drawers that will not shut; and if you know Germany too you must in honesty compare with it the pleasant rooms you have inhabited there for less rent than she paid her Mrs. Quickly,--rooms with cool clean painted floors, solid old dark elm cupboards, and bedsteads that when you had pitched the _Plumeau_ on the floor or the sofa were inviting because they were made with spotless home-spun linen.