Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MY ROOM On the point of beginning a descriptive journey around my room, I can't exactly tell why I thought it more appropriate to begin with my bed. Is it because I find it as nearly comfortable as anything can be in this uncomfortable house ? Is it because I spend in it the best part of the twenty-four hours ? The real reason, I think, is that it is the only bed in the house. Sicilian beds, especially in the interior of the island, are invariably composed of two iron trestles, on which lie three deal boards painted in sombre green. Upon these are laid some half- dozen mattresses as hard as a miser's heart. This is a Sicilian bed, and a more ungainly object I have never seen, especially when, during the day, these mattresses are rolled up and piled on each other, with the sheets and counterpane neatly folded on the top, conveying thus a vague impression that the owner of the bed has started for a lengthy journey. My bed is quite different. In fact, it is a bed in the common, accepted, and natural sense of the word, having the usual springs, with only one mattress, though that tolerably hard—a thing which ceased to disturb me when I heard that this mattress had been made some ten years before, and not touched since. How this unique specimen of a nearly civilized bed came to be found here is a mystery to me. However, here it is. I appropriated it the day we arrived, guessing, when I saw it, that it was the only bed in the house where I might possibly close my eyes in sweet oblivion of life and its dull cares. The walls of this room have remained in their rustic, unfinished state ever since it was built, some hundred years ago, and no one as yet has had the moral courage to cover them with the paper which was bought for that purpose long ago, and which fills s...