Chaise longue

“ A CREAM-COLORED PORCELAIN STOVE IN A NEW YORK HOUSE
Which reminds me: the floor cushion, made of the same velvet made for carpeting, is a modern luxury we can't afford to ignore. Lately I have seen such beautiful ones, about three feet long and one foot wide, covered with tapestry, with great gold tassels at the corners. The possibilities of the floor cushion idea are limitless. They take the place of the usual footstool in front of the boudoir easy chair, or beside the day bed or chaise-longue, or beside the large bed, for that matter. ”

“ Our lamps, blazing down the road, lit up, at less than a dozen paces, a picture that might have come straight from a Christmas card—a broken-down post-chaise, with a horse tethered to a gate beside it, and by the chaise a solitary human figure standing, a woman, wrapped in a long dark cloak and wearing a poke-bonnet as old as your grandmother's. ”

“ The man’s face was all over blood; and then the monster, seeing the gentleman in the chaise present a blunderbuss at its neck, crept on its forehead to the chaise-step, keeping its head almost under its forelegs, and getting close to the door, reared upright, vaulted into the inside, broke through the other side-glass, and ran at a great rate to the adjoining wood. ”

“ At last he happened to fly low enough to pass through the door, and immediately vanished into the gladsome sunshine.—Ludicrous situation of a man, drawing his chaise down a sloping bank, to wash in the river. The chaise got the better of him, and, rushing downward as if it were possessed, compelled him to run at full speed, and drove him up to his chin into the water. A singular instance, that a chaise may run away with a man without a horse! [Pg 264]
Saturday, August 12th.—Left Augusta a week ago this morning for Thomaston. Nothing particular in our drive across the country. ”

“ Here, more by good fortune than anything else, we presently stumbled upon a chaise and horses, drawn up in the gloom of sheltering trees, in which we deposited our limp burden as comfortably as might be, and where I made some shift to tie up the gash in his brow.
"It would be a fine thing," said the Postilion moodily, as I, at length, closed the chaise door, "it would be a nice thing if 'e was to go a-dying." ”

“ It was just the sort of chaise that I had dreamed of for my purpose: eminently rich, inconspicuous, and genteel; for, though I thought the postmaster no great authority, I was bound to agree with him so far. The body was painted a dark claret, and the wheels an invisible green. The lamp and glasses were bright as silver; and the whole equipage had an air of privacy and reserve that seemed to repel inquiry and disarm suspicion. With a servant like Rowley, and a chaise like this, I felt that I could go from the Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s House amid a population of bowing ostlers. ”

“ Again referring to the general use of chaises, I remember that such men as President Quincy, Lucius Manlius Sargent, Ebenezer Francis and Jeremiah Mason were frequently seen driving their chaises, and Mr. Webster often rode in one over the road from Marshfield to Boston, holding the reins himself, and having a trunk lashed to the axle. Mr. Mason, above mentioned, the distinguished lawyer, one day when riding in his chaise, turned from Washington street into Spring Lane, and met a truckman coming up with his team. ”

“ This hasty description of the vehicle in question can easily be enlarged upon by any connoisseur of the taste of those days. The reddish-yellow chaise was decorated on each side with bouquets of flowers in their natural colours; the edges of the doors bore narrow gilt mouldings; the whole could not by any means boast the glassy varnish of to-day’s Vienna mode; the body was not fully rounded, though drawn in below with a bold, coquettish curve; then there was a high top with stiff leather curtains, which, for the time being, were pushed back. ”

“ Here, in a substantial family chaise, setting forth betimes to take advantage of the dewy road, come a gentleman and his wife, with their rosy-cheeked little girl sitting gladsomely between them. The bottom of the chaise is heaped with multifarious bandboxes and carpet-bags, and beneath the axle swings a leathern trunk dusty with yesterday's journey. Next appears a four-wheeled carryall, peopled with a round half-dozen of pretty girls, all drawn by a single horse, and driven by a single gentleman. ”

“ Rowley and I descended from our claret-coloured chaise, a couple of correctly dressed, brisk, bright-eyed young fellows, like a pair of aristocratic mice; attending singly to our own affairs, communicating solely with each other, and that with the niceties and civilities of drill. ”

“ In a few minutes I was in the neighborhood of a habitation which I looked upon rather with detestation than any emotion of alarm; when what was my astonishment to behold a man—the sound of the wheels of the chaise being doubtless audible at some distance in the clear, still night—come out of the gate in front of the house and station himself in the middle of the somewhat narrow highway. ”

“ Then, all at once, my Lord Stour gave a cry of relief.
"There's the chaise!" he exclaimed. "It has just turned the corner of this street.... No! not that way, Douglas ... on your right.... That is Lady Barbara's chaise, is it not?"
"Yes, it is!" ejaculated the other. "Thank Heaven, her man Pyncheon has had the good sense to bring her here. Quick, Mr. Notary!" he added. "The door!"
The next moment a Sedan chair borne by two men in handsome liveries of blue and silver came to a halt just below. Already Mr. Baggs had hurried down the stairs. ”

“ He nodded.
‘And I was so unlucky as to get a pistol ball in the panel of my chaise,’ I continued, ‘which makes it simply useless to me. Do you know any one likely to buy?’
‘I can well understand that,’ said the landlord, ‘I was looking at it just now; it’s as good as ruined, is that chaise. General rule, people don’t like chaises with bullet-holes.’
‘Too much Romance of the Forest?’ I suggested, recalling my little friend of the morning, and what I was sure had been her favourite reading—Mrs. ”

“ The ordering of the carriage is easily accomplished. The inn possesses one horse and one chaise. The landlord has a story to tell of the horse, and a story to tell of the chaise. They resemble the story of Francis Raven—with this exception, that the horse and chaise belong to no religious persuasion. "The horse will be nine year old next birthday. ”

“ The room, of no great size, was over-crowded with clumsy furniture made in the early years of the nineteenth century, when solidity was much more valued than beauty. What with six ordinary chairs, two armchairs, a horse-hair sofa to match, a sideboard, a bookcase, and a fender-stool all of mahogany, to say nothing of an Indian screen and a rosewood piano, there was scarcely room to move. ”

“ The four-wheeled chaise was a small chariot with a wide window in front.
Gray, writing to his mother in 1739, speaks of the French chaise in which he was making the grand tour with Horace Walpole.
“The chaise,” he writes, “is a strange sort of conveyance, of much greater use than beauty; resembling an ill-shaped chariot, only with the door opening before 148instead of the side. Three horses draw it, one between the shafts, and the other two on each side, on one of which the postillion rides, and drives too: This vehicle will upon occasion, go fourscore miles a day, but Mr. ”

“ Even as the chaise drove up before the steps, and as I stood staring down at it, motionless, although within me there was turmoil enough, the fellows came round with my horses. Bess, the Irish mare, took umbrage at the little grotesque figure that, with an alertness one would scarcely have given it credit for, skipped from the chaise, looking more like one of those images I have seen on Saxon clocks than anything human. ”

“ The next day, after getting a stock of cedar, I started to fashion the couch for Mr. Millward. This with the making of another armchair occupied two days. The couch I made like a great chair, with a back pivoted to fold down or prop up, and wove an upholstery of rushes. It occurred to me that I could easily saw some wheels out of a round limb and mount them as rollers on which to move the couch more easily over the smooth floor ”

“ The usual posting-chaises in this country hold six persons with ease; and people even of the first rank generally have two or three servants in the chaise with them. In point of œconomy, these carriages are well imagined; and, in the time of frost, not inconvenient; for here travellers take special care to fortify themselves against cold by cloaks lined [450] with fur. But when it rains hard, two of the company at least must be drenched; for the German chaises are never intirely covered above. ”

“ In vain the house-maid is taught to wheel the sofa and turn chair towards chair; in vain it is attempted to imitate a negligent arrangement of the centre-table.
"Books that have really been read and laid down, chairs that have really been moved here and there in the animation of social contact, have a sort of human vitality in them; and a room in which people really live and enjoy is as different from a shut-up apartment as a live woman from a wax image.
"Even rooms furnished without taste often become charming from this one grace, that they seem to let you into the home-life and home-current. ”

“ And when the spreading chestnut tree over Dexter Pratt’s smithy fell, the children of Cambridge gave their pennies to fashion him an armchair of its wood, and used to traipse fearlessly into the Longfellow house from time to time to call on the poet and see that the chair gave him good service. Without question it is one of the homeliest chairs in the world—and one of the finest.
One cannot leave the house without a glance at his other friends, his closer intimates, nor enter the house without remarking them. ”

“ The reluctance to go to one's couch is not at all a reluctance to slumber, for almost all of us will doze happily in an armchair or on a sofa, or even festooned on the floor with a couple of cushions. ”

“ Nothing could be more cheerless than the place—one black horsehair sofa, two rather narrow arm-chairs, and six other chairs, a table that nearly filled up the room in the middle of it, upon which a dusty-coloured worsted mat reposed, three funeral cards of departed relations framed and glazed upon the chimney-piece, and a convex mirror, which reflected and distorted with strict impartiality everything that was there. ”

“ A tumble-down trunk in a corner of the room did precarious duty for a chair; a faded carpet hid the floor; a cheap rocking-chair in the act of moulting its upholstery spread its luxurious arms invitingly near the dim window; and a table, on which a pack of German playing cards was coyly half concealed by a newspaper, a coal-hod, and a poker, completed the necessary furnishing of the apartment. ”

“ Chairs which seemed to have grown in their places for centuries crowded the corners of hallway and stairs like gigantic nightmares of their original prototypes. Monstrous curtains of red brocade, grown purple with the years, seemed to hang from every window and door crowding out the light and air. ”

“ As when a tailor takes a piece of goods upon his counter, and rends it across, there came to our ears from the avenue the long tearing sound of a chaise and four approaching at the top speed of the horses. ”

“ I believe in its days it had been a decent enough travelling chaise: at any rate it moved fast. Once more we rolled through the silent street, on the hillside roads, up hill and down dale, my bride warmly nestled in my arms, and both of us telling over again the tangled tale of the year that had been wasted for us.
And thus, in the idle iteration of lovers’ talk, with the framing of plans for the future, changeable and bright as the clouds of a summer’s day, did we fill the rapid hours which brought us to Zittau in the early morning. ”

“ The manse, fortunately for a bachelor, was furnished as to the main necessities of living, but it wanted all the details which go to make a home. Though the study contained a massive black walnut desk and chair, a big leather armchair, a luxurious leather couch, and a very good and ecclesiastically sombre rug upon its floor, it seemed bare enough to a man who had lately left a warm little room of nondescript furnishing but most homelike atmosphere. ”

“ Of course a great deal can be done to modify existing evils, by a judicious arrangement of screens and curtains, by taking out useless furniture, by substituting a comfortable low bed, easy to get at, for a cumbrous couch where the unhappy patient’s nose seems as if it was intended to rub against the ceiling, and various other improvements. But what can remedy a smoky chimney, or a grate where all the heat goes up the chimney, or windows that rattle, and doors that open in every direction except the right one? ”

“ It is not really good taste to have these doors of plate glass as that militates against the primal idea of strength and protection.
A Door Divan.
Chairs and sofas we have without end in variety and beauty. Every alcove and nook in every possible sort of room has been thought of and provided for except the one place that exists in almost every house and is the one place where people are always wanting to sit—that is the doorway itself. Folding doors between communicating rooms are seldom closed. An ordinary chair within a few feet of the space never looks well. ”