BED.
BED means one thing to a river and another to a gun-carriage; a hen has her own unshared notion of it, as a garden has; it is familiar to copper ore, and to shell-fish, as well as to weary human bones. To the limited and prosaic apprehension of those bones, it suggests a piece of furniture set in a room of a house; nothing newer, wilder, or more inspiring. The average citizen is not critical as to its possibilities; his plain nest is as fine and legendary to him as the ground on Parnassus in Phocis, where a man should wake a poet; or the shepherd-boy's station on Latmos, with Dian every night coming down to kiss his eyelids; or the cradle of Saint Hilary at Poitiers, where mad folk are laid to sleep, and are said to get up with the sun, sane and respectable as himself, eased of their gorgeous imaginings.
Bed, nevertheless, kind and flawless in behavior though it be, has at some time or other set wicked tongues wagging. A superstition hangs over it, which we must endeavor to disperse,—a saucy, irrelevant vulgarism, which his accomplished uncle once flung in tropes at our friend Mr. Arthur Pendennis: that "as a man makes his bed, so must he lie in it." Now, the actual gist of this knock-down impertinence is explained more clearly, and in a more elegant manner, by the kindred proverb, "As one sows, so will he reap," or by any of a dozen phrases put together by some old wiseacre to express the inscrutable law of retribution and the recoil of one's doings upon himself. How this analogy between a man's making his bed and his lying in it came to signify, in English, the personal lex talionis, is past finding out. It is all tinkle and tinsel, and no true allegory. Lear's Fool, for one, never could have fathered it. There is a certain trade sense in which a man, if his gifts run that way, is not unlikely to make a bed; and another, in which the re-arrangement of the rumpled article in question, the supplementary but vital act, becomes the privilege of a chambermaid. For observe that the creative verb of the adage seems to indicate, not the constructive carpenter-work, but merely the repetitionary smoothening and shaking, to be accomplished, meanwhile, not by the chambermaid aforesaid, but—diverting fatality!—by the man. Bed-making, under such conditions, is scarcely a pastime native to the masculine mind. Custom hath whimsically set her back against it. Grace and order would be coy to follow on a 'prentice hand. 'Tis ten to one that the strata of coverings shall coincide with no precedent established among
