“Children who were required to sleep in trundle beds low to the floor were likely to be especially familiar with the whiskery closeness of rats. Wherever people were, were rats. An American named Eliza Ann Summers reported in 1867 how she and her sister took armloads of shoes to bed each night to throw at the rats that ran across the floor. Susanna Augusta Fenimore Cooper, daughter of James Fenimore Cooper, said that she never forgot, or indeed ever quite got over, the experience of rats scuttling across her childhood bed. Thomas Tryon, author of a book on health and well-being in 1683, complained of the “Unclean, fulsom Excrement” of feathers as being attractive to bugs. He suggested fresh straw, and lots of it, instead. He also believed (with some justification) that feathers tended to be polluted with fecal matter from the stressed and unhappy birds from which they were plucked. Historically, the most basic common filling was straw, whose pricks through the ticking were a celebrated torment, but people often used whatever they could. In Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood home, dried cornhusks were used, an option that must have been as crunchily noisy as it was uncomfortable. Privacy was a much different concept in former times. In inns, sharing beds remained common into the nineteenth century, and diaries frequently contain entries lamenting how the author was disappointed to find a late-arriving stranger clambering into bed with him. Benjamin Franklin and John Adams were required to share a bed at an inn in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1776, and passed a grumpy and largely sleepless night squabbling over whether to have the window open or not. Bryson, Bill. At Home (pp. 458-459). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 457). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (pp. 456-457). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. ”