A CURIOUS SUPERSTITION.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 49, 27 February 1937, Page 3 (Supplement)

A CURIOUS SUPERSTITION.

Shakespeare's Ariel slept in a cowslip's bell; Cleopatra on a bed of gold; Sir Francis Drake in a sailor's hammock, which had all the comfort he needed, for he was dreaming all the time of Plymouth Hoe. Charles Waterton, the astonishing Yorkshire naturalist, was rich enough to have had the most comfortable bed in England, but he chose to lie on the floor, a block of wood doing duty as a pillow. When someone is ill-tempered we often say that he must ha<ve got out of bed at the wrong side, and it is curious thai, as tar back as the days of ancient Home it was thought to be unlucky to put the left foot out of bed before the right, Caesar believing in the superstition witli all his heart. Five centuries ago beds were a luxury which only wealthy people enjoyed, most poor folk having to be content with a bed of straw or rushes. In the fifteenth

and sixteenth centuries elaborate fourposters were to be seen in the houses of the (nihility, some of them marvellously carved and inlaid with rare woods. I p and down Knglund there are still a few of those quaint beds, which were so high that a ladder was needed to reach them. rerhajw the mo.st famous of all beds is the one we may see at South Kensington. Known as the Great Bed of Ware, it is 11 feet square and is said to have been made for Warwick the Kingmaker.