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"I found my new room a great improvement on my old one," he says, "it not being at all musty and having a fourpost bedstead in it, which was quite a little landed estate.
Then, asking lively questions the while as if to conceal a blunder and its correction, I moved quickly between him and it and slipped the missive under a pillow of the fourpost bedstead. He was not wordy, and he tarried but a moment, yet he explained his paralysis.
The girls and Denny were already much cleaner than when we parted from them. There was a courtyard to the inn and a wooden staircase outside the house. We were taken up this, and washed our hands in a big room with a fourpost wooden bed and dark red hangings just the sort of hangings that would not show the stains of gore in the dear old adventurous times.
And the last words, like the first, must be of an old man in London. We found him in the midst of a brilliant assembly; we leave him alone. We leave him lying stiffly on his solemn fourpost bed, with his keen, proud face turned fearlessly towards his Maker. His lips are still; they wear a smile which even in death is slightly cynical.
No two rooms were alike; each possessed some marked characteristic of its own one bedroom, for example, was distinguished by its fourpost bed with its paintings on the canopy and head another, by its little two-light high window with Adam and Eve in stained glass; another with a little square-window containing a crucifix, which was generally concealed by a sliding panel; another by two secret cupboards over the fire-place, and its recess fitted as an oratory; another by a magnificent piece of tapestry representing Saint Clara and Saint Thomas of Aquin, each holding a monstrance, with a third great monstrance in the centre, supported by angels.
In the costumes and in the faces of figures or busts, produced in the highly ornamental oak chimney pieces of the time, or in the carved portions of the fourpost bedsteads, the national characteristics are preserved, and, with a certain grotesqueness introduced into the treatment of accessories, combine to distinguish the English school of Elizabethan ornament from other contemporary work.
The date is about 1560 to 1570, and it has been described in local literature of nearly 200 years ago. S. Kensington Museum. Another Museum specimen of Elizabethan carved oak is a fourpost bedstead, with the arms of the Countess of Devon, which bears date 1593, and has all the characteristics of the time.
I looked at the quaint little fourpost bed that I had found in that shop at Bath, a perfect specimen of its date, about 1699, with the old deep rose silk pressed over the shell carving. I had an insane desire to open the drawers in the chest and touch her stockings and gloves. I had a wild feeling altogether I wanted my love, rebellious, unrelenting, anyhow! I just longed for her.
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