_Curtains_, _shades_ and _screens_ have been wonderfully improved and their use made widely possible by modern inventions and new adaptation of old methods. Wood, cotton, silk, paper, combined or uncombined with other materials, in many novel ways unknown to our ancestors, have rendered these articles available in thousands of homes where their use was unknown and impossible a century ago. Among the most convenient attachments to shades is the spring roller, invented by Hartshorn of America, in 1864, whereby the shade is automatically rolled upon its stick to raise or lower it. Window screens for the purpose of excluding flies, mosquitoes, and other insects, while freely admitting the air, are now made extensible and adjustable in different ways to fit different sizes of windows. Curtains and shades are provided with neat and most attractive supporting rods, to which they are attached by brass or wooden rings, and provided with easily manipulated devices to raise and securely hold them in any desired position. The art of steaming wood and bending it, by iron pattern forms adjustable to the forms desired, as particularly devised in principle by Blanchard in America in 1828-1840, referred to in Wood-working, has produced great changes in the art of furniture making, especially in chairs. A particularly interesting illustration of the results of this art occurred in Austria. About forty years ago the manufacture in Germany and Austria of furniture by machinery, especially of bent wood-ware, became well established there; and by the time of the Vienna Exposition in 1873, factories on a most extensive scale for the construction of bed furniture were in operation among the vast mountain beech forests of Moravia and Hungary. The greatest of these works were located in Great Urgroez, Hungary, and Bisritz, Moravia, with twenty or more auxiliary establishments. Between five and six thousand work people were employed, the greater part of whom were females, and it was necessary to use steam and water motors, to the extent of many hundred horse power.