four posts the second bed is set. Children are usually enchanted with these beds, and bedtime ceases to be one of their hated hours. If the inevitable happens and they quarrel over the upper bed, it is easy for you to set a weekly turn by which each of the two children sleeps in the bed he wants. And as goes without saying, the upper bed must have a rail to keep the child from rolling off its sides.
If you have three children, you can order a very low bed made, which you slide under the lower bed by day. And if the idea of hanging beds does not appeal to you, there is another way of fitting in three or four children: beds made in graduated sizes, one placed under the other, as is sometimes done with cigarette tables. In this way the room gains a fair space to be set aside for play.
5 — Arranging the room: The first thing worth doing to beautify the room is to use bright, gay colors for the wood of the furniture, instead of that brown customarily used for the other rooms. Besides the cheer they kindle in the child's heart, these colors are usually washable and easy to clean. Bright, happy colors must be used, too, for the bedcovers and the seats. And do not neglect the effect that colors and patterns leave on the child's soul, for many of them inflame his senses and plant fear in him. Here is a curious incident that happened to me with my own children. I once put the two of them in a room whose wallpaper was not quite to my liking — red and green ran riot over it in great veins. Within a week the two children began having troubled dreams and screaming in their sleep that a big spider was falling
on them in bed. I wondered greatly at the cause of these dreams; I cut out their supper and took to reading them stories they loved before bedtime. I did not understand the cause until a day came when one of them was sleeping in the afternoon and began to scream in terror. I ran to him and found him pointing at the great red and green veins on the ceiling and calling them the hateful spider. The next day I changed the wallpaper, replacing it with a lovely quiet color, and so put an end to those troubled dreams.
We know from our own experience how colors affect us. Blue and green are cheerful colors. Red is the color of agitation. Brown and black are unattractive colors. It is best, then, to use quiet colors in the child's room — colors that are quiet but attractive as well. And there is no harm in bringing in strong colors among the soft ones, so that the whole is attractive.
If you use pictures on the walls of the room, choose them with care, for it is they that will shape the growth of his taste; it is advisable, too, to change them from time to time, lest his eye
grow so used to them that he no longer sees them. And see that they are hung at the level of the child's eye, for it is he who must see them.
As for the paint on the walls, if it can be of a kind that can be washed and cleaned, so much the better, and let the color go well with the colors of the furnishings. Thus your child's room will be not merely a room for sleeping, but a place where his little soul is cultivated and his taste refined.
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