Tick mattress
This is then filled to make a mattress, with material such as straw, chaff, horsehair, coarse wool or down feathers,[2]: 674–5 vol1 and less commonly, leaves, grass, reeds, bracken, or seaweed.
A tick filled with flock (loose, unspun fibers, traditionally of cotton or wool) is called a flockbed.
[3][4] If the pile of mattresses threatened to slide off the bed, in 16th- and 17th-century England, it was restrained with bedstaves, vertical poles thrust into the frame.
[7] Before recycled cotton cloth was widely available in Japan, commoners slept upon kami busuma, stitched crinkled paper stuffed with fibers from beaten dry straw, cattails, or silk waste, on top of mushiro straw floor mats.
Cotton was introduced from Korea in the 15th century but did not become widely available throughout Japan until the mid-eighteenth; commoners continued to rely on wild and cultivated bast fibers.
[8] Later, futon ticks were made with patchwork recycled cotton, quilted together and filled with bast fiber.
Beech leaves were a quieter stuffing; if harvested in autumn before they were "much frostbitten", stayed soft and loose and did not become musty for seven or eight years, far longer than straw.
"That is capital," said her grandfather; "now we must put on the sheet, but wait a moment first," and he went and fetched another large bundle of hay to make the bed thicker, so that the child should not feel the hard floor under her--"there, now bring it here."
Heidi had got hold of the sheet, but it was almost too heavy for her to carry; this was a good thing, however, as the close thick stuff would prevent the sharp stalks of the hay running through and pricking her.
It looked now as tidy and comfortable a bed as you could wish for, and Heidi stood gazing thoughtfully at her handiwork.
He returned to the loft with a large, thick sack, made of flax, which he threw down, exclaiming, "There, that is better than hay, is it not?"
Heidi began tugging away at the sack with all her little might, in her efforts to get it smooth and straight, but her small hands were not fitted for so heavy a job.
Her grandfather came to her assistance, and when they had got it tidily spread over the bed, it all looked so nice and warm and comfortable that Heidi stood gazing at it in delight.
