THE
BED-ROOM AND BOUDOIR.
CHAPTER I.
AN IDEAL BED-ROOM.—ITS WALLS.
T is only too easy to shock some
people, and at the risk of shocking
many of my readers at the outset, I
must declare that very few bed-rooms
are so built and furnished as to
remain thoroughly sweet, fresh, and airy
all through the night. This is not going
so far as others however. Emerson repeats an
assertion he once heard made by Thoreau, the
American so-called "Stoic,"—whose senses by
the way seem to have been preternaturally
acute—that "by night every dwelling-house gives out
a bad air, like a slaughter-house." As this need
not be a necessary consequence of sleeping in
a room, it remains to be discovered why one's first
impulse on entering a bed-room in the morning
