Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 May 1885 — The Pillow-Sham. [ARTICLE]

The Pillow-Sham.

If ever there was an insufferable arrogance of fashion, it was exemplified in the gradual growth and overwhelming majority of the pillow sham. It is a delusion and a snare. It is a horrid nightmare. It ought to be relegated to the limbo of the past with ruffled pantalettes, and'other horrid things. It has broken many a good man’s heart, if not his head. It is a pitiful sight to see a strong man wrestling with a pil-low-sham, in an elbow-and-shoulder catch-as-catch-can struggle. And he is always thrown. A real lively pillowsham can tucker out, the strongest man. It would have de-athleteized Hercules. And there is not the slightest doubt that the pillow-sham, with which my lady adorns her chamber, came to its being through a sordid law of necesity. Some one who had only one room, and one pair of pillows, invented the mockery to cover up a multitude of soiled pillow-cases. Didst ever try to lay thy weary head on a pillow-sham in its prime and not break thy neck! The awful stiffness of that inhospitable surface strikes dismay to the soul. Saying the good-night prayer used to be the bets noia of sleepy childhood. The pillow-sham is the dragon of adulthood. First you catch your sham. Then you essay to put it somewhere for the night, but it will neither sit down nor stand up—it must be laid out in state. Some fiend has now invented a head-piece for the bed, which now sustains the sham over one’s head during the night, where it see-saws like the sword of Damocles and inspires hideous dreams. Oh, take away the uncomfortable thing and heap high the plump, inviting pillows, white and drift-like, into whose gentle depths the weary head can sink to refreshing rest. .Nobody need ever be ashamed of spotless pillows, or sacrifice comfort to gentility by converting them into divans of misery by the help of that Ishmaelite pillow-sham. — Exchange.