Our Little Lady | Page 3

are not any sheets or pillow-cases; but a
thick, hard bolster, stuffed like the mattress with straw, serves for a
pillow.

At the foot of the oak bedstead is a large oak chest, big enough to hold
a man, in which the owners keep all their small property of any value.
There are no chairs, but the deep windows have wooden seats, and two
wooden stools are in the corners. As to wardrobes, chests of drawers,
dressing-tables, and washstands, nobody knows of such things at that
day. The chest serves the purpose of all except the washstand, and they
find that (as much as they have of it) at the draw-well in the little back
yard. The window is just a square hole in the wall, closed with a
wooden shutter, so that light and air--if not wind and rain--come in
together. A looking-glass they have, but a poor makeshift it is, being of
metal and rounded; and those who know what a comical aspect your
face takes when you see it in a metal teapot, can guess how far anybody
could see himself rightly in it. It is nailed up, too, so high on the wall
that it is not easy to see anything. This is all the furniture of the
bedroom.
Downstairs there is more though there are no chairs and tables, unless a
leaf-table in the wall, which lets down, can go by that name. There are
two or three long settles stretching across the wall--the settle was called
a bench when it had a back to it, and a form if it had not. There is a
large bake-stone in one corner; the bread is put on the top to bake, with
the fire underneath, and when there is no fire, the top can be used as a
table, a moulding board, or in many other ways. But it must not be
supposed that such bread is in large square or cottage loaves like ours.
It is made in flat cakes, large or small, thick or thin. By the side of the
bake-stone is the sink, or rather that which answers to one, being a
rough brick basin, with a plug in the bottom, and just beneath it is a
little channel in the brick floor, by which, when the plug is pulled up,
the dirty water finds its way out into the street under the house door.
People who live in this way need--and wear--short gowns and stout
shoes.
The opposite corner holds the pine-torches and chips; they burn nothing
but wood, for though coal is known, it is very little used. This is partly
because it is expensive; but also because it is considered shockingly
unhealthy. The smoke from wood or turf is thought very wholesome;
but that from coal is just the reverse. Opposite the bake-stone is the

window; a very little one, much wider than it is high, and rilled with
exceedingly small diamond-shaped panes of very poor greenish glass
set in lead, there being so much lead and so little glass that the room is
but dark in the brightest sunshine. Indeed, it is decidedly a sign of
gentility that the house has any window at all, beyond the square hole
with the wooden shutter.
Up and down the room there are several stools, high and low; the high
ones serve when wanted as little movable tables. In the third corner is a
bread-rack, filled with hard oat-cake above, and the soft flat cakes of
wheat flour below; in the fourth stand several large barrels containing
salt fish, salt meat, flour, meal, and ale. From the top of the room hang
hams, herbs in canvas bags, strings of smoked fish, a few empty
baskets and pails, and anything else which can be hung up. The rafters
are so low that when the inmates move about they have every now and
then to courtesy to a ham or a pail, which would otherwise hit them on
the head. A door by the window leads into the street, and another
beyond the barrels gives access to the back yard.
How would you like to go back, gentle reader, to this style of life? This
was the way in which your forefathers lived, six hundred years
ago--unless they were very grand people indeed. Then they lived in a
big castle with walls two or three feet thick, and ate from gold or silver
plates, and had the luxury of a chimney in their dining-rooms. But even
then, there were a good many little matters in respect of which I do not
fancy you would quite like to change with them! Would you like to eat
with your fingers, and to find creeping creatures everywhere, and to
have no books and newspapers, and no letters, and no