There are many household curios which cannot be classified under the headings of the foregoing chapters. They represent well-known features in every home, and yet each little group has an individuality of its own. Some may say that the main features of house-furnishing have been left out of consideration, and that they are the most interesting household curios when age and disuse have come upon them. Household furniture, however, has been fully dealt with in the "Chats" series in the two volumes entitled "Chats on Old English Furniture," and "Chats on Cottage and Farmhouse Furniture," to which books those interested in the curiosities of cabinet-making and village carpentry are referred. Yet notwithstanding the completeness of those works there are a few objects which have so entirely passed into the range of household curios, and their uses were so entirely apart from present-day furniture, that some of them are specially noted in the following paragraphs, together with a few other isolated antiques. Dower Chests. If there is one piece of furniture above another that is surrounded with a halo of romance, surely it is the dower chest! We can picture the incoming of the coffer in all the newness of hand polish, fresh from the hands of the village carpenter or the retainer who had wrought the gnarled old oak grown on the estate for a favourite daughter of his lord--that chest which was to be packed full of fragrant linen, between which was laid sweet lavender, and richly embroidered garments for the bride, who, with her personal belongings stowed away therein, was to pass from the parental home to her newly wedded and unknown life. There are ancient chests full of historic memories, such as those in which the wealth of monarchs has been stored, like that in Knaresborough Castle, which, according to legend and some reference in old deeds, came over with William the Conqueror. In the Castle Museum there is another chest made for Queen Philippa in 1333--a veritable dower chest.