Calkins, J.E., Page 9

and so should rest for the good long day we should have on the morrow, we were shown, candle in hand, to a roomy, airy upper ohamber, without a fireplace, or a family portrait, or any other effort at interior decoration, but with simple comfortable furnishings, the chief of these being a huge, old, high-post bedstead, capped off with a Gargantuan feather bed that looked to be unscalable without a ladder. By all visible evidence it was one of the old corded beds that were in vogue a hundred years back; no springs; but we did not miss them. Mr. Muir, whose ever-preferred bed chamber was the starlit open air, went to his repose on a aot/ on the flat roof of a west side porch, or bay window, and Helen slept in a small tent that was guyed fast on some similar flat area above the front door. The sleeping arrangements of the family were elementally simple, like ^f£ the rest of its equipment for living* But this elimination of the needless was not carried to absurd extremes; when light or fire was wanted matches were used, not flint and steel. John Muir had a fine sense of the practical. It was the very next morning — there had been only that first evening and then this first morning in which our measure could be taken:— that I was conducted upstairs, to a large and relatively empty room, Mr. Muir\u27s workshop. Explicitly details are not remembered; only the impression that ithttps://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmr-all/1114/thumbnail.jp