Where the old-furniture mania exists, an artistic dining-room can be made by using all nut-brown paint, Essex & Co.’s ‘Kenesaw’ design, stamped on real brown paper, a gold and brown leather dado, all yellow serge or velveteen curtains, and a golden-brown square carpet; and great care should be taken in both rooms to have the proper tablecloths, which Burnett makes from a design I gave him, and which have been largely used (and recommended by the several imitators of mine which have sprung up in divers papers since I first began my own notion of giving advice on the matter of house decoration and arrangement through the columns of a newspaper, now some six long years ago), and which are far better and more artistic than any others I have ever seen. The cloth is plain serge or felt, with a contrasting border united to the cloth itself by a gimp in which both colours are mingled, and finished off with a ball fringe. These cloths cost about 25_s._ for an ordinary table, and, as they will clean and dye, would last some years if properly looked after. I have already spoken about the morning-room decoration, and therefore I will only add a few words on the subject of the drawing-room, where the yellow-and-white scheme I so often recommend cannot be improved upon by those who can afford a reasonably expensive scheme of decoration. Of course the very greatest care must be taken to avoid anything like the gold-and-white paper of our ancestors, but this usually was accompanied by grained maple paint, which gave the last touch of horror to the scene, and therefore could never resemble the delicate ivory paint which Aspinall has made so easy for us; and I still admire Mr. Smee’s beautiful yellow-and-white paper at 11_s._ a piece better than anything else, and with this I advise a dado of Collinson & Lock’s ‘47’ cretonne. This should be secured with a screwed-on dado-rail, as then the cretonne could be removed to be washed; all the chairs should be put into frilled cretonne covers of the same cretonne, made like those in Fig. 13; the curtains should be of Pither’s printed linen at 1_s._ a yard, edged with ball [Illustration: FIG. 14.--Frilled Chairs and Sofa.] fringe at 6_d._ a yard, and the carpet should be dark blue pile, with a pattern that resembles tiny daisies powdered all over the surface in a paler shade of blue. Great exception has been taken to Pither’s printed linen because it fades. So it does; but then it is very cheap, it lasts two years in a sunny window, four in one that is not sunny, and, finally, dyes beautifully, fringe and all, coming back from the immortal Pullar as good as on the day it was first bought. I don’t think one can complain very much about a material which behaves like that, can one? But, of course, the printed linen as curtains can be replaced by silk, damask, or by ‘47’ cretonne itself, should the first-named material be objected to.