AN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BEDROOM.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20363, 21 July 1934, Page 26 (Supplement)

AN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BEDROOM.

Lovers of old furniture may he interested in the following extract from a letter written by an old lady to her daughter in the year 1850. It describes a visit which she paid as a child of eight, in the year 1784, to her grandmother, who lived ip what was then the country, but is now a busy Manchester suburb. “I slept in a curious old bed, the head and top all of carved wood, and the top held up by a hook and chain from the ceiling. There was no foot to the bed. but a curtain ran all round, and the bed itself was so low that if I dropped anything on the floor I could easily pick it up without getting out of bed. There was also in the room a large oval table with a flap which let down, and the table was beautifully painted with fruit—apples, pears, two sorts of grapes, peaches, a melon cut in two and looking as if it had just been dropped there by chance, red and white currants, and n bunch of nuts. In the middle of all was a parrot, hut not very brilliant. All was in perfect preservation, but black with age. The rest of the furniture was a set of drawers such as you never saw. high-backed chairs, the backs and seats r.!l carved in solid wood, and an immense black oak chest filled with bed linen**-