The Birmingham age-herald., 1906-02-25

think that seventeen children almost could sit in row on 1t, and often I've seen it filled in that way, with small children whose heads didn't come up to the top of the sofas back; and a great show row of children thus seated on the old sofa did make.
 "It stood in our sitting room this mar vellous old sofa and l well remember that right in the middle of the back edge of the seat you could find if you looked for it-and when the old sofa got dilapi- dated it remained always visible-a great flat, stout haircloth loop. And if you got a good grip on that haircloth loop you could lift the back edge of the long broad seat right up, for the seat was hinged al the front edge, and keeping on lifting you could lift the seat up and over to the front until you had that top part with the cushion side down, and the under side on level with the rest of the sofa
 "Then you discovered at either end of the front of the top as thus turned over a stout little leg made to turn on pivot; and you turned these legs down to rest on the floor for a support, and then, in the opened out sofa you had an amply long and spacious bed, needing only to be duly fixed up with spare bed clothes to make a bed far from uncomfortable to sleep in.
 Now, there was really a folding bed used in day when folding beds, as such, were not even dreamed of, and certainly were not needed for the room they would have saved, for then all the bedrooms Ia 1oio 1S that commonly stood in them. And the big sofa bed was used rarely. Only upon occasions of overflow such as l have de- seribed did anybody ever sleep on it, and We always used to look upon sleeping on the sofa as sort of lark
 ''So much have times changed since those days, now the lark would be to sleep in a bed. And 1 venture to say that there are thousands of younger people living in the present day who never in their lives have once slept in a regular bed.
 T know that I haven't slept In one myself for years. l sleep now not in a four poster as of old. but in what l believe they call a telescope couch, an ingenious space saving contrivance, not covered with hair cloth, but made of angle iron and wire, one longitudinal section of which telescopes into the other. It Is one Of the many more or less similar styles of folding beds now made
 "Telescoped, and with It's folded mat tress laid on top of 1t, the telescope couch becomes a sort of sofa without back or ends. Opened and with the mat tress that folded had served as a eush- ion, opened out on it, the couch becomes a bed, and on such a bed now sleep reg ularly.
 If anybody had told me in my youth that the time would come when l should so to speak, sleep on the sofa every night l should have laughed at him, for , that would have seemed impossible But that is what l am doing now.
 Still the telescope couch itself does not seem so strange to me as 1t must to many who, of fewer years than mine, never knew the old four posters and the big opening sofas, but only the more modern forms of bedsteads and the many modern styles of folding beds that with our dimin- ishing rooms have now come into use. To many of these younger folk the folding bed must seem new and strange, indeed but it doesn't seem so to me. For his tory repeats itself, and l know history; and different thing as is the folding bed of today yet I can trace it's ancestry back to the grandfather of all folding beds, the old time open out sofa. They may not have existed for the same reason but there were folding beds before ours.