The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene Du Bois

We walked upstairs and into a bedroom on the first floor. It was furnished in excellent Moroccan taste. I say excellent with
some reservations. I personally am not too fond of that style. But aside from these observations, I noticed nothing unusual
about the room at first.
"Have there been improvements made in this room?" I asked.
"Mrs. M. used to be a nurse," replied Mr. F., "and to nurses bed making seems to become extremely boring after awhile. If
you stop to think of it, nurses in large hospitals spend a good deal of their time in malting beds. It is natural that they should
soon tire of it, particularly when they suddenly find themselves to be as rich as Mrs. M. We all came to Mrs. M.'s rescue with
this amazing bed. It has continuous sheets."
"How does it work?" I immediately inquired.
Mr. F. walled over to Mrs. M.'s bureau, opened the top drawer, and took from there a crank. He inserted the crank into a hole
in the footboard of the bed and asked me to watch closely. He started to twist the crank and the sheets started to move across
the bed, passing on rollers through a sideboard on through the floor. "When I twist this crank," explained Mr. F., "the sheets
pass through this sideboard down through the floor into the cellar. Then, they pass through a boiler where they are washed,
then through a drying machine. They next pass through steam heated rollers where they are pressed; then come up through
the floor, through the other sideboard of the bed on rollers, and back to the top of the bed. This continuous sheet is marked off
in bed-widths. Every morning Mrs. M. simply turns the crank until a bed-width has passed from one side to the other side of
her bed. This action starts the washing machines, diverts heat from the furnace to the drying machine, and while one length of
sheets is being pressed fresh widths of hot white sheets are revealed on her bad."
[Post edited by Newt at 01/25/2018 8:42PM]