Washington standard. [volume] (Olympia, Wash. Territory) 1860-1921, 1879-08-08
Lying in Bed.


Taking an occasional day in bed,
simply on account of indisposition,
is very simple and rudimentary no.
ton OF this glorious institution. Bed
is the natural domicile of every man:
In bed we laugh. in bed we cry:
And born in bed. in bed We die
Bayard, the French psychologist,
maintained that man is an animal who
exercises the thinking faculty best in a
horizontal position. Thus there are
high artistic, social and intellectual
uses connected with the occasional day
in bed which imperatively claim dis
cussion. Brindley, the great engineer,
when he was fairly bothered and puz-
zled by some tough problem, always
betook himself to bed until he had
solved it. Most people have great
kindness for Lord Melbourne. who,
under the affectation of frivolity, used
to get up Hebrew and the Fathers, and
imperturbable good humor to bear with
his wife, Lady Caroline, while the
pretty Byron-struck termagant used to
smash the drawing-room furniture.
His intimate friends would find the
premier calmly taking breakfast in bed,
with letters and dispatches strewed all
over the Counterpart. The poets have
been terrible to get out of bed. Per
haps it is because the visions of the
day and Of the night sweetly inter
mingle. The poet Thompson cultivated
laziness as a fine art, and thought out
his poems in bed. Pope was a still
worse fellow. When he had fit of
inspiration upon him he would keep
the servants running about for him all
through the night. He made amends
to them by the Righteousness of his
walls"
Let us analyze this lying in bed a
little further. 1 maintain that IN the
mere fact of lying in bed there is some
thing healthy and recuperative to the
system. The wheels of life are oiled
and eased. The proper and legitimate
purpose of stopping in bed is to go to
sleep. There is nothing like sleep.
There is no tonic or medicine in the
Whole world like sleep. The more
sleep the brain gets the better does the
brain work. All great brainworkers
have been great sleepers. Sir Walter
Scott could never do with less than ten
hours. A fool may want eight hours,
as George III. said, but philosopher
wants nine. The men who have been
the greatest generals are the men VINO
could sleep at will. Thus it was with
both Wellington and Napoleon. The
greatest speakers in the House of Com
mons have been the men who could go
slx "a
This explained the juvenility Of the
aged Palmerston. "Sleep," says the
Greek proverb, sis the medicine for
every disease" "If he sleep he will do
WE'LL" A friend told me that he treated
himself for fever; he went to bed,
with large pitcher of lemonade by
his side he drank and slept, slept and
drank, and slept himself well again.
When you take to your bed get all the
sleep you can out of your bedstead,
even although, to quote Dick Swivel
ler's saying, you have to pay for a
double-bedded room, confessing that
you have taken an unreasonable
amount of sleep out of single bed.
You will be banking whole store of
recuperative energy. Even if you can
not sleep, still keep to your bed. There
is no more pestilent heresy than that
you should get up directly you are
awake. If it is the early riser who
catches the worm, the worm is great
idiot in rising still earlier in order to
be caught. If you do not get sleep by
lying in bed you get rest. You secure
the fallow ground which will hereafter
produce q good harvest. Sleep is, of
course, the proper employment for bed,
but if you don't sleep, you can lie still
and read. I don't believe that the man
who gets up really learns or does more
than the man who lies in bed. If for
q moment the writer may be egotist-
ical, some of the hardest work which
he has ever done has been from the
early dawn until after breakfast in bed.
OF all sleep in the world there is none
SO good as what you get, in the way OF
treasure trove. after the usual time of
waking-when, in point of fact, you
have given up the expectation of get
ting any more sleep. As for being
''called," as the saying goes, that is
simply a relic of the barbarism Of our
ancestors. I should quarrel with any
man who presumed to ''call" me. One
of the main beauties of an occasional
day in bed is that you get an extra
stock of sleep, which goes to the credit
side of your sanitary account.-Har-
per's Bazar.
The WALLED LAKE. The greatest
sc