raiment out of sight as ever they were when they were allowed to strew it about in their entrances, at their own sweet wills. It is, however, usually impossible to live in an ordinary suburban house unless the furniture be made, in a measure for that special abode. For the rooms are so awkward and tiny that ‘combination’ furniture must be employed, or else one cannot have space to move. No bed should ever be draped in any way. If the bedroom is properly arranged and ventilated, while all draughts are excluded, curtains cannot be required, and no bed need present a starved or undecorated appearance if pictures are properly arranged behind it, or a bookcase hung on the wall above it, and the pillows properly put into frilled cases, and placed during the day high up on under pillows. At night the look of the bed behind the sleepers cannot trouble them, but it will be all right if, as I said before, pictures are hung properly, just, and only just above the top rail of the plain and simple brass bed, the only kind which should ever be allowed in any house. If brass is too dear, then plain iron must replace it; the iron can be Aspinalled ‘real ivory,’ and so be made to look quite superior in every way, should the plain black iron be objected to. I am quite shocked to see that a strenuous effort is being made to revive the beautiful, but unhealthy, wooden bedsteads of our ancestors, but I do hope someone will form an ‘anti-wooden bed league,’ and scotch the thing in its very earliest days, for there are people who will buy anything if assured by an enterprising tradesman that it is the newest thing out, and that a similar article was sold to a member of the aristocracy during the last week or so. Now, the very idea of the newness should warn off any wary buyer, for a new thing cannot have been really tried and found successful, while anyone can be fairly sure that a thing which has been sold, and sold largely for ten or more years, must be a success in one way or the other. Really it does seem a little late in the century to combat the vast disadvantages of wooden bedsteads! still, it must certainly be done, else once more shall we have to put up with them, to the great detriment of our health. Just think how impossible it would be to make a wooden bed absolutely safe should infectious disease seize the owner! Then too it encourages insects, and is open to all sorts of other objections which those who think can discover for themselves. Therefore stick to brass and iron and the excellent wire-woven mattresses, which only need supplementing with a really good hair mattress to make an ideal couch, particularly if we see the latter is turned every day, and moved from the head to the foot of the bed, to ensure an equal amount of wear.