An amusing sidelight upon the imperiousness of fashion was afforded us when the painter set to work upon these. They had once been treated in that form of decoration known as “oak grained”--that pale yellow colour touched with an implement technically called a comb, professing to give to ordinary deal the appearance of British oak, and possibly deceiving a person here and there who had never seen oak. But when my painter began to burn off this stuff he discovered that the column had actually been papered and then painted and grained. This made his work easy, for he was able to tear the paper away in strips. But when he had done this he made the further discovery that the wood underneath was good oak with a natural grain showing! Could anything be more ridiculous than the fashion of sixty or seventy years ago, when the art of graining had reached its highest level? Here were beautiful oak columns which only required to be waxed to display to full advantage the graceful natural “feathering” of the wood, papered over and then put into the hands of the artist to make it by his process of “oak-graining” as unlike oak as the basilica of St. Mark is unlike Westminster Abbey! But for a large garden where everything is on a heroic scale, the only suitable pergola is one made up of high brick or stone piers, with massive oak beams for the roof. Such a structure will last for a century or two, improving year by year. The only question to consider is the proper proportions that it should assume--the relations of the length to the breadth and to the height. On such points I dare not speak. The architect who has had experience of such structures must be consulted. I have seen some that have been carried out without reference to the profession, and to my mind their proportions were not right. One had the semblance of being stunted, another was certainly not sufficiently broad by at least two feet. In this connection I may be pardoned if I give it as my opinion that most pergolas suffer from lack of breadth. Six feet is the narrowest breadth possible for one that is eight feet high to the cross beams. I think that a pergola in England should be paved, not in that contemptible fashion, properly termed “crazy,” but with either stone slabs or paving tiles; if one can afford to have the work done in panels, so much the better. In this way nothing looks better than small bricks set in herring-bone patterns. If one can afford a course of coloured bricks, so much the better. The riotous gaiety of colour overhead should be responded to in some measure underfoot.