sheets, blankets, and coverlids hung around it for the occasion, while the whole floor was strewed with pallets. Here Mr. Edgarton and his whole party, including Logan and the teamsters, were expected to sleep. A popular poet, in allusion to this patriarchal custom, impertinently remarks,
Some cavillers
Object to sleep with fellow-travellers.
And on this occasion the objection was uttered vehemently, the ladies declaring that martyrdom in any shape would be preferable to lodging thus like a drove of cattle. Unreasonable as such scruples might have seemed, they were so pertinaciously adhered to on the one side, and so obstinately resisted by the exceedingly difficult nature of the case on the other, that there is no knowing to what extremities matters might have gone, had not a compromise been effected by which Logan and the wagon-drivers were transferred into the room occupied by the farmer's family, while the Edgartons, the sister, the maid, the greyhound, the pug-dog, and the parrot, remained sole occupants of the apartment prepared for them.
