of a few catalogues of up-to-date office furniture will establish this. Here, then, is the last stage of the country Windsor chair. The twentieth-century Windsor has come to town and graces the head cashier's private office in a bank or the senior partner's room of a firm of stockbrokers. CHAPTER IX LOCAL TYPES CHAPTER IX LOCAL TYPES Welsh carving--Scottish types--Lancashire dressers, wardrobes, and chairs--Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Cambridge, and Essex tables--Isle of Man tables. The charm of collecting cottage and farmhouse furniture lies in the wide area over which it is found. Those who have given especial attention to collecting it have learned instinctively to differentiate between the work of various localities. Some well-defined types of cottage furniture are only to be found in certain counties, and nowhere else. Take for example the ladder-back and the spindle chairs. The latter are usually found in the northern half and the former in the southern half of England. It is obvious that craftsmen developing on original lines, or on lines more or less apart from outside influence, must establish designs peculiarly identified with their field of labours. The sturdy insularity of the British peasant, and his uneasy reception of foreign suggestion, have had a very pronounced influence upon his methods of work. He has the defects of his qualities, the stern, almost uncompromising conservatism in habit of mind and in his daily pursuits. A close study of the thoughts, and as far as is recorded the written ideals, of the rural labouring population exhibit an extraordinary fixity of purpose in clinging tenaciously to old customs. The country songs more often than not express disapproval of innovations and call up the memories of slowly vanishing customs. The farm hands recall wistfully the old style of Shearers' feasts and Harvest homes, when great festivities with song and dance and old country sports enlivened the company. In Yorkshire this was termed the Mel Supper, in Kent the Kern Supper, and in parts of the North of England it was called the Churn Supper. Annual feasts were given to labourers such as the Wayzgoose or Bean feast, which later name remains to this day. The good old days is a refrain not confined to the cottager in his relation with the farmer. The farmer, imbued with the same wistful regard for the vanished past, bewails the May Day tenants' feast of the eighteenth-century English squire. We get touches of disdain for the oncoming fashion of seclusion which invaded the farmhouse in "A Farmer's Boy," by Robert Bloomfield. He laments that the annual feast of the harvest home had lost its former joviality. This was written in 1798. "The aspect only with the substance gone." Evidently the mug that passed around was becoming a thing of the past. "The self-same Horn is still at our command, But serves none now but the plebeian hand."