Page:Diary of a Pilgrimage (1891).pdf/62

 cushions, each one a yard square, placed one on top of the other at one end of the mixture.

"These!" exclaims the weary traveller, beginning to feel that he does not want to go to bed at all. "These are not pillows! I want something to put my head on; not a thing that comes down to the middle of my back! Don't tell me that I've got to sleep on these things!"

But the girl does tell him so, and also implies that she has something else to do than to stand there all day talking bed-gossip with him.

"Well, just show me how to start," he says, "which way you get into it, and then I won't keep you any longer; I'll puzzle out the rest for myself."

She explains the trick to him and leaves, and he undresses and crawls in.

The pillows give him a good deal of worry. He does not know whether he is meant to sit on them or merely to lean up against them. In experimenting upon this point, he bumps his head against the top board of the bedstead. At this, he says, "Oh!" and shoots himself down to the bottom of the bed. Here all his ten toes simultaneously come into sharp contact with the board at the bottom.

Nothing irritates a man more than being rapped over the toes, especially if he feels that he has done nothing to deserve it. He says, "Oh, damn!" this time, and spasmodically doubles up his legs, thus giving his knees a violent blow against the board at the side of the bed. (The German bedstead, be it remembered, is built in the form of a shallow, open box, and the victim is thus completely surrounded by solid pieces of wood with sharp edges. I do not know what species of wood it is that is