I myself remember a carpet that began life quite forty years ago, for it was over ten years old when I made its acquaintance in a country dining-room; it was drab, and was ‘enlivened’ with spots of brown, like enlarged ladybirds. It lived for twenty years in that room, covered in holland in the summer, and preserved from winter wear by the most appallingly frightful printed red and green ‘felt square’ I ever saw; it then was altered for the schoolroom, then went up into ‘the girl‘s’ bedroom, and still exists in strips beside the servants’ beds, although the original owner of that fearful possession has been dead over twenty of those forty years; and when I consider the dirt and dust that has become a part and parcel of it, I am only thankful that our pretty cheap carpets do not last as carpets used to do, for I am sure such a possession cannot be healthy; though the present proud possessor points to the strips, as a proof of how much better things used to wear in her mother’s days, than they do now, in these iconoclastic ones of ours. I am afraid I am not an orthodox housekeeper, for I confess most frankly I do not want my things to wear for ever, certainly not my carpets and curtains, and that is one reason why I am so thankful for the present style of pretty light cretonnes, mattings, and Kidderminster carpets. They are so clean and bright, and enable us to have our bedrooms fresh, pleasant, and new, instead of making them up out of things that have seen their best days in another sphere; and as I want Angelina to recollect she may have to spend some little time in the bedroom occasionally, as years go by, I wish to impress upon her to remember all this in the arrangement of the house, and to be sure and buy only those colours that give her pleasure, and to have no jarring ugliness to fret her, and add in any measure to her time of illness and convalescence; for, as I have said before, no one knows how much we are affected insensibly by our surroundings, and how much our spirits are affected too by what we have to look at! The first thing to recollect in choosing one’s paper is that there should be nothing aggravating in it--no turns and twists that shall bother us as we lie in bed; no squares or triangles that flatly refuse to join; in fact, nothing special that can possibly worry us. I had once on one of my walls a [Illustration: FIG. 17.--A corner in a bedroom, Gable-end, Shortlands.] charming paper of Japanese chrysanthemum design. It had little colour about it--only a faint pink flush, that just gave the idea of warmth without a glare. To give body to this, the dado was of Indian matting with a dado rail and wainscot paint of a good terra-cotta; the pink shade, not the brown. The ceiling was papered with a pale diaper-patterned terra-cotta paper, which was most pleasant to look at, and I had matting and rugs on the floor. A slight idea of this room can be obtained from the illustration on the previous page.