=The Spindle-back Chair.=--The spindle-back chair is of long lineage. As early as the reign of Charles I. this type was known. There is still treasured in America the chair of Governor Carver, with simple turning in legs and back, which practically consisted of upright posts rounded and having slight ornament. The back was set with "spindles." The older types of these chairs had thick upright posts, the back and back legs being two posts and the front legs, continued upward beyond the seat, forming supports for the arms. These posts are often six or seven inches in circumference, and belong to early-Jacobean days. The type found its way to America in Puritan days and has continued to be a favourite. Hickory wood was used for American specimens, and considerable attention has been paid to this form of chair and its varieties, the differing heights of the posts and the number of the spindles and their character, by American collectors. In England examples are not easily found of early date. The examples illustrated (p. 235), a Nursing Chair on rockers and an ordinary Spindle-Back Chair, are of eighteenth-century days, and are sufficient to indicate the type of chair, but these two represent the style when it had become of more general use. Practically it was not until the eighteenth century that such types were commonly used in cottages and farmhouses. These turned chairs, turned in every portion but the rush seat, lend themselves to the above-mentioned two styles of treatment. Their upright posts forming the open back can be treated with vertical splats divided by horizontal divisions, or they can, as in the ladder form, receive horizontal splats. The complete simplicity of this attitude towards the back absolved the homely cabinet-maker from dangerous experiments. Avoiding curved backs, he had not to face the intricacies of the nicety of balance in the splat. Altogether it was a very satisfactory solution, and in practice resulted in the production of a wide range of chairs, differing in slight details but well within the range of the local workman's art.