_Ends?_ Grief, anxiety, “the thousand several ills that flesh is heir to,” pass away before the lapse of time or the soothings of love, and sleep once more folds its dove-like wings above the couch. “If there be a regal solitude,” says Charles Lamb, “it is a bed. How the patient lords it there; what caprices he acts without control! How king-like he sways his pillow,—tumbling and tossing, and shifting and lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it to the ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples. He changes _sides_ oftener than a politician. Now he lies full length, then half-length, obliquely, transversely, head and feet quite across the bed; and none accuses him of tergiversation. Within the four curtains he is absolute. They are his Mare Clausum. How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man’s self to himself! He is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated on him as his only duty. ’Tis the two Tables of the Law to him. He has nothing to think of but how to get well. What passes out of doors or within them, so he hear not the jarring of them, affects him not.” In this climate a sight of the sun is prized; but we love to see it most from bed. A dormitory fronting the east, therefore, so that the early sunbeams may rouse us to the dewy beauties of morning, we love. Let there also be festooned roses without the window, that on opening it the perfume may pervade the realms of bed. Our night-bower should be simple—neat as a fairy’s cell, and ever perfumed with the sweet air of heaven. It is not a place for showy things, or costly. As fire is the presiding genius in other rooms, so let water, symbol of purity, be in the ascendant here; water, fresh and unturbid as the thoughts that here make their home—water, to wash away the dust and sweat of a weary world. Let no _fracas_ disturb the quiet of the dormitory. We go there for repose. Our tasks and our cares are left outside, only to be put on again with our hat and shoes in the morning. It is an asylum from the bustle of life—it is the inner shrine of our household gods—and should be respected accordingly. We never entered during the ordinary process of bed-making—pillows tossed here, blankets and sheets pitched hither and thither in wildest confusion, chairs and pitchers in the middle of the floor, feathers and dust everywhere—without a jarring sense that sacrilege was going on, and that the _genius loci_ had departed. Rude hands were profaning the home of our slumbers!