"Bedstead" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... down in a distant corner, pulling a doll's bedstead to pieces for the express purpose of putting ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... clean, was cold and bare. A greenish paper covered the walls, and a low, little iron bedstead, the head of which formed a kind of shelf, stood in one corner; a stove, fixed in the chimney-place, was surrounded by an iron grating, which forbade a near approach; a table fastened to the wall, a chair placed before this table, and also clamped to ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... servant-girl's small chamber, and on the lower floor, which served, at the same time, as a kitchen, hall, and sitting-room, a couch had been prepared for the two ladies. But the young Countess von Truchsess could not be prevailed upon to occupy one-half. She placed the cane chair against the high bedstead, and, sitting on it as on a tabouret at the foot of a throne, she supported her head on the cushions of the bed, over which the crimson satin blanket, lined with fur, that the ladies had wrapped around their ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... but neatly furnished, and very clean. The hand of taste and order was everywhere visible. Snow-white curtains festooned the two small windows, and concealed all of a turn-up bedstead but two of its legs. A small array of white crockery shone from an open closet; and a squat-looking stove, which made the apartment agreeably warm, was smartly polished, and was evaporating cheerful music out of a bright teakettle. ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... the rich Pompeiians lived. The floor is paved in black and white mosaic, with a marble basin in the centre. The doors opening from this hall conduct us to smaller apartments, two reception rooms, a parlor, the library, and six diminutive bedrooms, only large enough to contain a bedstead, and with no window. It must have been the fashion to sleep with open doors, or the sleepers must inevitably ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... away at that time; but she knew he would come again, and she must be prepared for him. She tried to make a large fire; but the wood was expended. She thought of rolling herself up in the bed clothes; but these would be torn off. The idea of getting under the low bedstead suggested itself, but she felt sure a paw would be stretched forth which would drag her out: her husband had taken all their fire-arms. At last, as she heard the jaguar this time scrambling up the end of the house, she, in despair, got ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... chamber, a small, neatly-furnished apartment, panelled with wood, and containing two windows, neither of which were made to open—a peculiarity not only to be found in Iceland but in some other places, especially in Tyrol. A wooden bedstead stood in one corner, covered with an elaborate patch-work quilt, whilst a table and two chairs constituted the remainder of the furniture. As our party numbered five, some pack boxes were added—not very soft seats after a long jolting ride. A looking-glass hung on the wall; but ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... committed a murder, and in order not only to save his life, but what was of much more consequence, his caste, he submitted to the penalty imposed; this was, that he should sleep for seven years on a bedstead, without any mattress, the whole surface of which was studded with points of iron resembling nails, but not so sharp as to penetrate the flesh. Sir George saw him in the fifth year of his probation, and his skin then was like the hide of a rhinoceros, but more ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... hunting the wasp. But he was too clever for them. They threw things at him and struck at him with their garments, pillows, slippers, whatever came to hand, and still he escaped, and in rushing round in their excitement everything in the room except the bedstead was overthrown. At last the wasp, tired out or terrified dropped to the floor, and they were on him like a shot and smashed him with the slippers they ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... on the subject. Very soon, Mr Gussle could be heard panting up the stairs with an iron chair bedstead, which was set up, with other conveniences, in the ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... bedstead, in a small attic of one of the meanest houses in the lowest portion of a provincial town in the south of England, a woman lay dying. The curtainless window and window—panes, stuffed with straw, the scanty patchwork covering ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... Zossima to his bedroom and seated him on his bed. It was a little room furnished with the bare necessities. There was a narrow iron bedstead, with a strip of felt for a mattress. In the corner, under the ikons, was a reading-desk with a cross and the Gospel lying on it. The elder sank exhausted on the bed. His eyes glittered and he breathed hard. He looked intently at ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Edith. Then the paper was taken off by the little girl's dimpled fingers, and there was displayed a most beautiful bedstead, with a lovely baby tucked up in ...
— The Little Nightcap Letters. • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... arranged that it could be completely closed—was carried right into the tent, the covering thrown back, and Escombe was lifted, on his mattress and still covered with the bedclothes, off the little iron camp bedstead and carefully placed in the litter, the jewel was replaced about his neck, the pillow under his head was comfortably arranged by Arima, the litter was closed, and then a little procession, consisting of the ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... suits of clothes, and my bedstead, and my dewingport, and everything—all, all gone, ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... with its bare walls, its sole furniture an iron bedstead and a stool riveted to the floor, in this little cell which the eye could glance round in a second, there was no vestige of a corpse: Jacques Dollon's body was ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... so cruelly in the course of investigation," went on the dame de compagnie, "that they injured him internally. When they had done with him he was doomed. He could do nothing for himself. I beheld him lying on a wooden bedstead without any bedding, with his head on a bundle of dirty rags, lent to him out of charity by an old rag-picker, who happened to live in the basement of the house. There he was, uncovered, burning with fever, and there was not even a jug in the room for the water to quench ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... furnished with a small iron bedstead hung with white cotton curtains looped back by bands of red cretonne; opposite the bed were a table covered with a cloth, and on it a desk, and a prie-dieu below a Crucifix nailed to the wall; the remainder of the room was fitted with bookshelves up ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... Governor Williamson Faulkner is a man of honor and I'd stake my life on that. He's being pushed hard and—Gee! Here we are at the General's and I can smell Kizzie's cream gravy with my mind's nose. I understand that your father was the last Henry Carruthers of five born up in the old mahogany bedstead that the General inhabits between the hours of one and five A.M. Some shack, this of the General's, isn't it? Nothing finer in the State." And as he spoke that Mr. Buzz Clendenning stopped the car before the home of my Uncle, the General Robert, and ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... through an open door the long dining-table with its glistening glass and silver. When she mounted that winding stairway and entered Marjorie's room she was stricken dumb by its pink curtains, pink wall-paper, and gleaming brass bedstead with pink coverlid and pink pillow-facings. And she nearly gasped when Marjorie led her on into another ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... bore a woven, yellow straw coffin from a poor house in East Street. The old Gevaldiger lay, with closed eyes and folded hands, in the coffin. Within the chamber, upon the bedstead, sat Johanne Marie, with a countenance pale as that of the dead which had been carried away. A compassionate neighbor took her hand, and mentioned her name several ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... the easy-chair and bought a bedstead and some very plain bedding. The bedstead was what is sometimes called a "scissors-bed." We could shut it up when we did not want to sleep in it, and stand ...
— Rudder Grange • Frank R. Stockton
... room, upon a couch, to superintend. In another, a lady was lying in bed, tucked up very tight and prim, and staring with much composure at a tripod, with a slop-basin on it; the usual form of washing-stand, and the only piece of furniture, besides the bedstead, in her chamber. One would never have supposed her to be labouring under any complaint, beyond the inconvenience of being miraculously wide awake, if the painter had not hit upon the idea of putting all her family on their knees in one corner, with their ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... Presbyterian Church contains nine "unknown." Burials will have to be made to-morrow. This morning workmen found three members of Benjamin Hoffman's family, which occupied a large residence in the rear of Lincoln street. Benjamin Hoffman, the head of the family, was found seated on the edge of the bedstead. He was evidently preparing to retire when the flood struck the building. He had his socks in his pocket. His twenty-year-old daughter was found close by attired in a night-dress. The youngest member of the family, a three-year-old infant, was also ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... slid back in the lock, gently, yet with tearing sound; mistress Watson entered, stood, stared. Before her sat Dorothy by the side of the bedstead, in her dressing-gown, her hair about her neck, her face like the moon at sunrise, and her eyelids red and swollen with weeping. She stood speechless, staring first at the disconsolate maiden, and then at the ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... moonlight fell bright and pure on sleeping fields, on vineyards, and dark far-spreading woods. Within the room a silver lamp suspended from the ceiling threw light upon the table, but left the farther parts of the chamber in shadow. The walls were hung with faded tapestry, and on a low bedstead in one corner lay a handsome cloak, a sword, and one of the clumsy pistols of the period. Across a high-backed chair lay another cloak and sword, and on the window seat, beside a pair of saddle-bags, were strewn half a dozen trifles such as soldiers ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... floor in his room, and with trembling hands is packing in his trunk his linen, scent bottles, prayer-books, braces, ties. . . . All his correct figure, his trunk, his bedstead and the table—all have an air of elegance and effeminacy. Great tears are dropping from his big blue eyes ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... about giants' In Deuteronomy iii. 11, among the conquests said to be made by Moses, is an account of the taking of Og, king of Bashan: "For only Og, king of Bashan, remained of the race of giants; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man." A cubit is 1 foot 9 888/1000 inches; the length therefore of the bed was 16 ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... imagination looked like a gulf of darkness. It proved, however, to be nothing more nor less than an unlighted hall of small dimensions, with a stair-case at one end and a door at the other, which, upon opening I found myself in a large, square room whose immense four-post bedstead entirely denuded of its usual accompaniments of bed and bolster at once struck my eye and for a moment held it enchained. There were other articles in the room; a disused bureau, a rocking chair, even a table, but nothing had such a ghostly look as that antique bedstead with ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... had all faded into dull, neutral tints and in one of the rooms a big patch of plaster had fallen away from the ceiling, showing the bare lath. Only one of the upstairs rooms had ever been furnished, and it now contained a corded wooden bedstead, a cheap pine table and one broken-legged chair. Indeed, the main building, which I have briefly described, had not been in use for many years. Sometimes, when Captain Wegg was alive, he would build a log fire in the great fireplace on a winter's evening and sit before it in ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... by short chains; 5 ditto of somewhat different make; 30 ditto, but with leather cuffs; 2 waist straps with leather cuffs attached; 9 pairs of leather cuffs padded; 11 pairs of leg-locks; a quantity of foot and hand cuffs (iron), with chains and catches to fasten to a staple in the wall or bedstead; 21-1/2 pairs of padded leather handcuffs; a larger quantity of handcuffs, single and double, of iron; 22 sets of strong body fastenings, very heavy chains covered with leather and iron handcuffs; a large quantity of broad leather ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... up, I was alone, lying on a sofa in a simply furnished little bedroom, with an ordinary mahogany bedstead, lit by a lamp standing on the marble top of an old Louis-Philippe chest of drawers. I soon discovered that I was a prisoner and that the only outlet from my room led to a very comfortable bath-room. On returning to the bedroom, I saw on the chest ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... pointing up to the window. "If one of those iron bars can be removed, you will have no difficulty in squeezing through. I can bring a file in my instrument-case the next time, as the cutting through those bars may prove a tedious business. But let me see! Your bedstead is of iron, and by wrenching off the side-rail you will have the means of working much more rapidly than with ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston
... close up by Polly's chair, that made her skip with apprehension, it was so like Miss Jerusha Henderson's—Joel was whooping away behind the bedstead to his horses that had become seriously entangled, so he didn't hear anything. But when Polly said, bashfully, "I can't see anything, ma'am," he came up red and shining to the surface, and stared with ...
— Five Little Peppers And How They Grew • Margaret Sidney
... Talithie Burwell and settled on Tipton's Fork in Crockett's Hollow, folks said no one could ask for a better start. The Tiptons had given the couple their house seat, a bedstead, a table. Jasper had a team of mules he had swapped for a yoke of oxen, and he had a cookstove that he had bought with his own savings. A step stove it was, two caps below and two higher up. The Burwells had seen to it that their daughter did not go empty-handed to her man. She had a flock tick, ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... with an axe or adze, was truly a luxury. One settler's wife pleaded that the house might be rolled up around a splendid flat stump; thus she had a good, firm table. A small platform placed about two feet high alongside one wall, and supported at the outer edge with strong posts, formed a bedstead. Sometimes hemlock boughs were the only bed. The frontier saying was, "A hard day's work makes a soft bed." The tired pioneers slept well even on hemlock boughs. The chinks of the logs were filled with moss ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... you, Monsieur le Garcon, he is. He slept here; he didn't find your bed comfortable; he came to us to complain of it; here he is among my men; and here am I ready to look for a flea or two in his bedstead. Renaudin!" (calling to one of the subordinates, and pointing to the waiter), "collar that man, and tie his hands behind him. Now then, gentlemen, ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... had been cleaned by those East Indians I had seen on the road, and the thousands who had died here buried, bits of uniform, shoes, and accoutrements and shattered rifles were sticking in the clay—and once we came across a portion of a bedstead, doubtless taken by some officer from a ruined and now vanished village to his dugout. Painfully, pausing frequently to ponder over these remnants, so eloquent of the fury of the struggle, slipping backward at every step and despite our care getting tangled in the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... you would call a chivalric old gentleman. A mite of a little woman with blood thinned by California zephyrs was hardly fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old duffer. But Johnsy he smote; and she lay, scarcely moving, on her painted iron bedstead, looking through the small Dutch window-panes at the blank side of the ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... a bedroom, and the rough bedstead, with its tumbled blankets, was in full view where Scipio stood. Although the morning was well advanced the bed was still unmade. Poor as the place was, it might, in the hands of a busy housewife, have presented a very different appearance. But Jessie was not a good housewife. She hated the care ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... Gorman's and got a single bedstead; now you figure out what it will cost for a tick, ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... Rat nests littered the corners and the brown rodents scuttled out with alarmed squeaks. The floor was of logs roughly hewn to flatness. Upon four blocks stood a rusty cookstove. A few battered, smoke-blackened pots and pans stood on a shelf and hung upon nails driven in the walls. A rough bedstead of peeled spruce poles stood in a corner. The remains of a bedtick moldered on the slats, its grass stuffing given over to the nests of the birds ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... way to the staircase, which was at the back of the house, and approached from a side entrance. "We have put him in the front chamber, which contains the 'Auger Hole.' Thee remembers it, Peggy? For further safety we have drawn the bedstead in front of the door. Unless 'twas known no one would think of looking in that closet for a hiding-place. There is also an old loom in a corner up attic which might serve right well for concealment, but mother thought the chamber with the 'Auger Hole' best; although ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... of house-keeping was to keep the shades down, whatever happened; and when David left home in the evening for any purpose of pleasure, she wept. David persuaded himself that he despised amusement, and went to bed each night at half-past nine in a folding bedstead in the front room, and, by becoming absolutely stolid from mere vegetation, imagined that he was almost fit to be ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... room for him on the fourth floor of a dyer's she knew, overlooking the Eau-de-Robec. She made arrangements for his board, got him furniture, table and two chairs, sent home for an old cherry-tree bedstead, and bought besides a small cast-iron stove with the supply of wood that was to warm the ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... see these old Jacobean hangings (perhaps the drapery of the now tabooed four-post bedstead), which might some thirty years ago have been carried off for the asking, sell at Christie's for L800, as happened in the dispersal of the Massey-Mainwaring sale last year. Even a panel of no use except to frame as a picture, ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... marriage property. He feared that the wife, should he not be able to replace it by a new one, or should she herself not be able to bring him one, as part of her dowry, would find the honeymoon rather lively. Phelim's bedstead admitted of no dispute, the floor of the cabin having served him in that capacity ever since he began to sleep in a separate bed. His pillow was his small clothes, and his quilt his own coat, under which he slept ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... pleasant things to say to him. "Push the table away and leave me alone," said Frau Therese, making Noemi and Dodi rise too. And as if all her strength had returned, she helped to carry the table into the next room, so that when his reverence knocked at the door she was alone, and had drawn her bedstead across the door-way so as to prevent access ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... here. Their trenches were deeply cut and were protected by an immense amount of wire. In the sand-dune area they used a vast quantity of sandbags, and they met the shortage of jute stuffs by making small sacks of bedstead hangings and curtains which, in the dry heat of the summer, wore very well. Looking across No Man's Land one could easily pick out a line of trenches by a red, a vivid blue, or a saffron sandbag. The Turkish dug-outs were most elaborate places of security. The excavators ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... infection, with typhus. Therefore, as soon as the patients and staff had been evacuated, it was set on fire, and the whole hospital, woodwork, tents and all that they contained, ascended to heaven in a great column of smoke. Among the contents was a nice new camp bedstead. Pending the decision as to the competent military authority in whose custody this should be placed, I gave orders for it to be transferred to my quarters. But, strangely enough, each senior officer ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... approach a description of the third act with diffidence. Such intense pathos, we feel, demands words of more sombre sound—ink of a darker hue, than we can command. The third scene is, in particular, too extravagantly touching for ordinary nerves to witness. Mary Clifford is in bed—French bedstead (especially selected, perhaps, because such things were not thought of in the days of Mother Brownrigg) stands exactly in the middle of the stage—a chest of drawers is placed behind, and a table on each side, to balance the picture. The lover leans over the head, the mother sits at the foot, the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... delighted to be given a bedroom candle in a brass candlestick, and to find on his arrival there that the plumber had never entered its sacred precincts, for a hat tub on a rubber cloth awaited the can of hot water, which would be lugged up to him in the morning; the four-post bedstead with its heavy damask hangings, the cushioned grandfather's chair by the open fireplace, the huge mahogany wardrobe and the heavy furniture—all were of the period of 1830. Back to such a room Mr. Pickwick had ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... shall soon see if that is true,' thought the old Queen, but she said nothing. She went into the bedroom, took all the bedclothes off and laid a pea on the bedstead: then she took twenty mattresses and piled them on the top of the pea, and then twenty feather beds on the top of the mattresses. This was where the princess was to sleep that night. In the morning they asked her how she ...
— Stories from Hans Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... going in and out, and in living in them. The bed rooms were extremely small. The walls of some of them were beautifully painted, but the rooms themselves were often not much bigger than a state room in a steamship. The bedstead was a sort of berth, formed upon a marble shelf built across from ...
— Rollo in Naples • Jacob Abbott
... would not have thought it, or that he had never thought anything at all about it, as the observer's imagination suggested. Having executed this feat, and reopened his eye, Mr. Weller proceeded to inquire which was the individual bedstead that Mr. Roker had so flatteringly described as an ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... and placed over the holes until the posts were put in the ground. The coffin-box and the three others containing her things were placed in the canoe and a roof of boards made over the central part, which was entirely covered with white cloth. The head part and the foot part of her bedstead were then nailed on to the posts, which front the water, and a dress nailed on each of these. After pronouncing the benediction, all left the hill and went to the beach except her father, mother, ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... the bedding from a neighbouring bedstead as he spoke, tore several blankets from the heap, and tumbled rather than ran down-stairs with them, while the friends he had left ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... both is as rare as it is useful. Indeed, in its practical utility the only thing I ever saw to equal it is a sofa my neighbour has bought as a Christmas surprise for her husband, and which she showed me the last time I called there—a beautiful invention, as she explained, combining a bedstead, a sofa, and a chest of drawers, and into which you put your clothes, and on top of which you put yourself, and if anybody calls in the middle of the night and you happen to be using the drawing-room as a bedroom, ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... should have shrieked at the top of my voice, and clung to the bedstead with all my might, if they had tried to take me," exclaimed Isabelle excitedly, "so that I would have been heard by the people in the neighbouring rooms, and I'm sure they would have ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... ("kinsman, comrade, or fellow"), also panggal ("pillow"), and panggan ("bedstead"); see Ling Roth's Natives of Sarawak, ii, p. xxvii. See Porter's Primer and Vocabulary of Moro Dialect (Washington, 1903) p. 65, where the Moro phrase for "sweetheart" is given as babay ("woman") a ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... door of a back room about twelve feet square, furnished in the plainest manner, uncarpeted, except for a strip that was laid, like a rug, beside the bedstead. ...
— Adrift in New York - Tom and Florence Braving the World • Horatio Alger
... as will fill two flour barrels tightly packed; sixteen pounds of refuse cotton, (such as is sometimes sold very low at the factories,) and half the hair of an old matress, (which should be well picked;) measure the bedstead you wish it for, and allow to each breadth of the ticking, a quarter of a yard in length over; for a small matress less should be allowed, and the same in width, (as it takes up in making;) cut the side strips as deep as you wish the matress, fit the corners, cut out a place ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea
... have rushed away. Helen caught him, he yielded, and allowed her to lead him into the room. There she lighted a candle, and as it came gradually alive, it shed a pale yellow light around, and revealed a bare chamber, with a bedstead and the remains of a moth-eaten mattress in a corner. Leopold threw himself upon it, uttering a sound that more resembled a choked scream than a groan. Helen sat down beside him, took his head on her lap, and sought to soothe him with such tender ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... after supper, I stretched myself out upon the floor under a convenient table, which answered practically and aesthetically all the purposes of a four-post bedstead, inflated my little rubber pillow, rolled myself up, a la mummy, in a blanket, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... the southwestern corner of the kitchen opens into the room in which the poet was born. This was the parlor, but as the Friends were much given to hospitality, it was often needed as a bedroom, and there was in it a bedstead that could be lifted from the floor and supported by a hook in the ceiling when not in use. In the corners are cabinets containing articles of use and ornament that are genuine relics of the Whittier family. The inlaid mahogany card-table between the front windows was brought to this house just ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... broken elbow-chair; A caudle cup without an ear; A batter'd, shatter'd ash bedstead; A box of deal, without a lid; A pair of tongs, but out of joint; A back-sword poker, without point; A pot that's crack'd across, around, With an old knotted garter bound; An iron lock, without a key; A wig, with hanging, grown quite grey; A curtain, worn to half a stripe; A pair of ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... by which they are suspended on the sides of the huts. As you enter there is always a partition-wall on your right hand, and a round entrance at the further end of the hut to this part, partitioned off. This space, so divided off, is the sleeping-place, where there is a raised bench of mud, or a bedstead made of cane or wickers. A few utensils for culture, an axe and a hoe, may be mentioned, all made by native blacksmiths, of the rudest description. Iron is found in the native rocks of Soudan, and is not imported. The greatest skill of the African blacksmith is, alas! shown in forging ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... but, owing to the aged dirt which had gathered upon it, refused any view of things without save in two or three places where the glass was broken; by these apertures, and at every point of the framework, entered a sharp wind. In one corner stood an iron bedstead, with mattress and bedding in a great roll upon it; a shaky deal table and primitive chair completed the furniture. Ornament did not wholly lack; round the walls hung a number of those coloured political caricatures (several indecent) which are published ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... The bedstead seemed a thing of life—so elaborate and wonderful was its art. Built of massive ebony with the most remarkable ivory carvings set in its gleaming black surface, artists, as many as could touch the material, had worked two years ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... said Norton. "Then a bedstead wants a bed on it, Pink; and blankets or coverlets or something, ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... Ortheris had deftly thrown all the rifles of the Guard on Mulvaney's bedstead, the Irishman's voice was uplifted as that of one in the middle of a story, and, turning ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... the window-curtain when she removed her lamp to the bedside. She employed herself there for a minute or two in putting on the clothes she had taken off, and in tightly fastening up the hair that she had loosened; then she put out the lamp and got into bed. The wooden bedstead creaked, and rubbed against the side of the house as she turned herself upon it. The creaking and rubbing could be heard on the ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... the period; and then, too, sliding doors began to be used as partitions. The coverings of these doors, silk or paper, were the "walls" for Japanese mural paintings of the period. As the tatami came into more general use, the bedstead of the earlier period, which was itself a low dais covered with mats and with posts on which curtains and nets might be hung, went out of use, being replaced by silken quilts spread on the floor-mats. Cushions and arm-rests were the only ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... gruesome night in an old country farmhouse last summer. The roof leaked and the rain came pattering down on my bed. There was no poetry in THAT. I had to get up in the 'mirk midnight' and chivy round to pull the bedstead out of the drip—and it was one of those solid, old-fashioned beds that weigh a ton—more or less. And then that drip-drop, drip-drop kept up all night until my nerves just went to pieces. You've no idea ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... home with the children as they invited me. I was always put in the spare room, and usually treated to warm biscuit and pie for supper. A few families were very poor, and there I was lucky to get bread and potatoes. In one house I remember the bedstead was very shaky, and in the middle of the night, as I turned over, it began to sway and lurch, and presently all went down in a heap. But I clung to the wreck till morning, and said ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... the impression aside, and never saw anything so real, so touching, and so actually present before my eyes, is nothing. I am husband and wife, dead man and living woman, Emma and General Dundas, doctor and bedstead—everything and everybody (but the Prussian officer—damn him) all in one. What I have always looked upon as masterpieces of powerful and affecting description, seem as nothing in my eyes. If I live for fifty years, I shall dream of it every now and then, from ...
— A Week at Waterloo in 1815 • Magdalene De Lancey
... we had not far to go, everything looked wintry. At half-past nine we ate supper, while a good fire crackled cheerily in the ingle and a wintry wind blew hard. The little log cabin was only ten feet long, eight wide, and just high enough under the roof peak to allow one to stand upright. The bedstead was not wide enough for two, so Le Claire spread the blankets on the floor, and we gladly lay down after our long, happy walk, our heads under the bedstead, our feet against the opposite wall, and though comfortably tired, it was long ere we ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... stood other borrowed treasures from the Figurehead House—a doll bedstead made by an old sea captain on one of his voyages. Each of its high posts was tipped with a white point, carved from the bone of a whale. Wonderful little patchwork quilts, a feather bed and tiny pillows made especially for the bed, were objects ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... his bedroom, and greatly admired the gorgeous furnishings and quaint, old-fashioned French bedstead. ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... lay, already insensible or at the last gasp, on coarse thatch, on the ground, covered by an old hempen sack. The picture represented the extremest poverty of the thirteenth century; a hovel without even a feather bed or bedstead, as Aucassins' ploughman described his mother's want; and the old woman alone, dying, as the ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... supper was preparing, we walked together to the posada. I found that my obliging host and hostess had indeed exerted themselves to an uncommon degree. An old rickety table had been spread out in a corner of the little room as a bedstead, on top of which was propped up a grand cama de luxo, or state bed, which appeared to be the admiration of the house. I could not, for the soul of me, appear to undervalue what the poor people had prepared with such hearty good-will, and considered ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... Sunday schools to teach classes of little children the age of Methuselah or the dimensions of Og the king of Bashan's bedstead.—HOLMES. ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... iron spikes erect on the Dean's bedstead, by which he is in danger of a broken shin at rising and going ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... should be cut in the logs at such distances as will draw the bag to its full width. The interior of the canvas should now be filled with dried grass, leaves, moss or spruce boughs, after which the bedstead ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... small close rooms, in narrow close back courts as they do, that they are not all swept off by some pestilence. I myself have seen half-a-dozen men at work in a room that was a little better than a bedstead long. It was as much as one could do to move between the wall and the bedstead when it was down. There were two bedsteads in this room, and they nearly filled the place when they were down. The ceiling was so low, that I couldn't stand upright ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... her forehead contracted. Every breath of cold air was cutting her lungs like a knife, but she looked up at me when I took her hand, and smiled. I never knew anybody so patient and uncomplaining. She was lying on a little iron bedstead, hard and narrow as a camp bed. The room was bare-looking, the floor being polished and with only two small rugs, one at the fireplace and one beside the bed, upon it. It looked like a nun's cell, and there was a certain suggestion of purity in the sweetness and order of it quite consistent ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... the threshold. On the bed, fully dressed, his legs stretched in front of him and his feet crossed, was the missing man Horikawa. His torso was propped up against the brass posts of the bedstead. A handkerchief encircled each arm and bound it to the ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... among them being Sir Oswald Mosley, Bart., Rev. Legh Richmond, Dr. Fox, and his son, and many other gentlemen of the country. Two of them were always in her room night and day. At the suggestion of Mr. Francis Fox, the bedstead, bedding, and the woman in it were placed on a weighing machine, and thus it was ascertained that she regularly lost weight daily. At the expiration of the ninth day of this strict watching, Dr. Fox found her evidently ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... pleases me more than the bedstead of Odysseus. I have tried to turn the passage describing it ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... after an evening of considerable worry, had retired to his little lean-to bedroom with its low, camp bedstead. It was useless sitting up any longer attempting one of those big worrying "thinks" which, usually, he was rather ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... At another moment, when descanting upon all her children collectively in one of her faithfully reported addresses to her familiar: "'My own family,' I says, 'has fallen out of three-pair backs, and had damp doorsteps settled on their lungs, and one was turned up smilin' in a bedstead unbeknown. And as to husbands, there's a wooden leg gone likeways home to its account, which in its constancy of walking into public-'ouses, and never coming out again till fetched by force, was quite as weak as ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... fee for having his blood let, Eleasar flung a stone at the judge, and wounded him; on which the judge said to him—"What meaneth this?" Eleasar replied—"Give him who wounded me the fee that is due to myself for wounding thee." The people of this town had a bedstead on which they laid travellers who asked for rest. If any one was too long for it, they cut off his legs; and if he was shorter than the bedstead, they strained him to its head and foot. When a beggar came to this town, every one gave him ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... delighted when they knew of this decision, and took an active part in preparing one room of the laundry for Ann's reception. Their mother had a plain bedstead moved in, and sent down from the house a bed and mattress, which she supplied with sheets, pillows, blankets, and a quilt. Then Uncle Nathan, the carpenter, took a large wooden box and put shelves in it, and tacked some bright-colored calico all around it, and made a bureau. Two or three ...
— Diddie, Dumps & Tot - or, Plantation child-life • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... catering for the automobile tourist. According to report they are all equally good. We chose the Capoul, on the Square Lafayette, and had no cause to regret it. We dined sumptuously, slept in a great ducal sort of an apartment with a hygienique bedstead (a thing of brass openwork and iron springs) tucked away in one corner, full fifteen paces from the door by which one entered—"Un bon kilometre encore," said the garcon de chambre, facetiously, as he showed us up. It promised airiness, at any rate, and if we were awakened at four ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... warned me it might be wanted. See here, Paul. We can tie one end to this heavy bedstead, knotting it also around the bolt of the door, and we can glide down like two veritable shadows, and drop silently into the river: Then we must swim to one of those small wherries which lie at anchor beside the sleeping barges. I know exactly what course to steer for that; and once aboard, ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... consuming longing for snuggery; my one fair, clear idea of the consummate golden fruit of the spirit's sweet content was a cosey place to get away to. In my longing I purred with the cat rolled up in her furry ball on the rug by the fire, making a high-post bedstead of a chair; in my longing I stole with furtive rats to their mysterious cave-nests in the wall. So do I now,—the more for that I lost, so long ago, my dear kitchen, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... officers saved a good many pianos and other furniture and stored it in the jail, for safe-keeping. But we kindle our fires with chips of polished mahogany, and I am writing on my knees with a piece of a flower-stand across them for a table, sitting on my camp bedstead. ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... above the ground floor—Traddles was on the landing to meet me. He was delighted to see me, and gave me welcome, with great heartiness, to his little room. It was in the front of the house, and extremely neat, though sparely furnished. It was his only room, I saw; for there was a sofa-bedstead in it, and his blacking-brushes and blacking were among his books—on the top shelf, behind a dictionary. His table was covered with papers, and he was hard at work in an old coat. I looked at nothing, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... a canopy, or rather tester, for the whole must have originally resembled an antique and massy bedstead, exhibiting the very incongruous appearance of a husband in bed with ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 187, May 28, 1853 • Various
... and also destroyed other articles in the room—as one might in a frenzy; and to complete the illusion of desperation, deliberately broke my watch. I then took off my suspenders, and tying one end to the head of the bedstead, made a noose of the other. This I adjusted comfortably about my throat. At the crucial moment I placed my pillow on the floor beside the head of the bed and sat on it—for this was to be an easy death. I then bore just enough weight ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... excellence of the tobacco; nor was his coffee to be despised. Several officers looked in occasionally, and we had a very pleasant evening. They were, however, at last hurriedly summoned off, and I threw myself down on the camp bedstead my host had prepared for ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... next morning the hat had vanished out of the bedroom of the exclusive hotel at Bath. Vera could not believe that it had vanished; but it had. It was not in the hat-box, nor on the couch, nor under the couch, nor perched on a knob of the bedstead, nor in any of the spots where it ought to have been. When she realized that as a fact it had vanished she was cross, and on inquiring from Stephen what trick he had played with her hat, she succeeded ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... great chimney, and a door with hinges,—every luxury except a latch, and that he could not have, for mine was the last that could be purchased. One of the regimental carpenters was employed to make a cradle, and another to make a bedstead high enough for the cradle to go under. Then there must be a bit of red carpet beside the bedstead, and thus the progress of splendor went on. The wife of one of the colored sergeants was engaged to act as nursery-maid. ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... floor, making a tub, by the light of the fire. The joists overhead were piled with seasoned wood, and long bundles of thin, dry fir, which is used for torches during the winter darkness. There was neither chair nor table in the hut; but a low bench ran around the walls, and a rough bedstead was built against one corner. Two buckets of sour milk, with a wooden ladle, stood beside the door. This beverage appears to be generally used by the Finns for quenching thirst, instead of water. Our postilions were sitting silently upon the bench, and we followed their ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... said Miss Deborah severely, and moved with deliberate dignity from the room, while Miss Ruth, much fluttered, took her dress from the high bedstead, which had four cherry-wood posts, carved in alternate balloons and disks, and a ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... suggested walking, as if no man had ever felt inclined to walk. Above all, the asylum authorities insisted on their own extraordinary cleanliness. Every morning, while Turnbull was still half asleep on his iron bedstead which was lifted half-way up the wall and clamped to it with iron, four sluices or metal mouths opened above him at the four corners of the chamber and washed it white of any defilement. Turnbull's solitary soul surged up against this sickening ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... what she saw: Half seated, half lying upon a rough bedstead spread with blankets, was Suzanne. Her hair had come undone and hung about her, her feet were still loosely bound together, and as the Kaffir, Asika, had said, her face was like that of a dead woman, and her eyes were set in a fixed unnatural stare. Before her was ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... solid ebony in the dining-room at Penrhyn Castle, the old oak in the dining-room at Trelacre, and the light oak in the drawing-room, the carved oak ceilings and pillars at Penrhyn, and the use of stone from St. Helen's there, as well as the bedstead that is made of slate, and the enormous table of the same material in the servants' hall. The interest in materials is a special instinct, a kind of sympathy with Nature showing itself by appreciation of the different qualities ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... is counted very rich who has procured a wooden bedstead to place his mat upon, and a wooden trunk, with a lock and key, to contain his clothes; such a man is considered ...
— Far Off • Favell Lee Mortimer
... very own, but once she was embarked on the subject talking with such rapture that every minute or two he had to beg her to be calm. She was the first person in that part of the world to think that old furniture need not be kept in the dark corners, and she knew where there was an oak bedstead that was looked upon as a disgrace, and where to obtain the dearest cupboards, one of them in use as the retiring-chamber of a rabbit-hutch, and stately clocks made in the town a hundred years ago, and quaint old-farrant lamps ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... more lively by the consciousness of the storm which raged without. My eyes, swimming in a sort of mist, wandered over all the details of my peaceful abode; they passed from my prints to my bookcase, resting upon the little chintz sofa, the white curtains of the iron bedstead, and the portfolio of loose papers—those archives of the attics; and then, returning to the book I held in my hand, they attempted to seize once more the thread of the reading which ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... destitute were furnished free with new supplies. Yet, such was the pinch of one long storm, that Dickey Shymer burned up the bark he designed to sell for grog; and the poor mischief of a Troffater, having not so much as bark, burned his best bedstead, then burned his eel-rack, and was unstocking his musket for a last lonely fagot, when Fabens drove up with a towering load of green maple wood. Grog-dealers were kept from freezing and starving, but they did no business ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... fretwork galleries for the display of china. His mirrors, which were often in the Chinese taste or extravagantly rococo, are remarkable and characteristic. In his day the cabinetmaker still had opportunities for designing and constructing the four-post bedstead, and some of Chippendale's most graceful work was lavished upon the woodwork of the lighter, more refined and less monumental four-poster, which, thanks in some degree to his initiative, took the place ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... upper loft, so low that I could touch with my hands the sooty rafters; the floor was of rough boards, through the joints of which you could see the gleam of the soldiers' fire, and occasionally discern their figures as they moved about; in one corner was a camp bedstead, by the side of which hung the child's sword, gorget, and sash; a deal table stood in the proximity of the rusty grate, where smoked and smouldered a pile of black turf from the bog—a deal table without ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... bare-faced, cold-hearted marriageable girls around whom they hovered. Many a time did she quietly slink away from the glittering, but wearisome, drawing-room, to go and cry in her own poor little room, in which stood a screen, a chest of drawers, a looking-glass, and a painted bedstead, and where a tallow candle burnt feebly in ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne |
