It was through hearing of the Knox house that I learned of a "death room." There was one over the eastern dining-room. These depressing rooms had but one window, and the paper was dark and gloomy--white, with black figures, and a deep mourning frieze. Benches were ranged stiffly around the sides, and there were drawers filled with the necessities for preparing a body for burial. Linen and a bottle of "camphire" were never forgotten. There the dead lay till the funeral. I can shiver over the intense gruesomeness of it. How Poe or Hawthorne could have let his inspired imagination work up the possibilities of such a room! A skeleton at the feast is a slight deterrent from undue gaiety, compared with this ever-ready, sunless apartment. This reminds me that I read the other day of a "deadly-lively" old lady, who, having taken a flat in the suburban depths of Hammersmith, England, stipulated before signing her lease that the landlord should put black wall-paper on the walls of every room except the kitchen. Possibly she had a secret sorrow which she wished to express in this melodramatic fashion. But why except the culinary department? We have been hearing a good deal lately about the effect of color on the nerves and temperament generally. A grim, undertaker-like tone of this kind would no doubt induce a desired melancholy, and if extended to the region of the kitchen range, might have furthered the general effect by ruining the digestion. A writer in a recent number of the _Decorator's and Painter's Magazine_, London, says: "An interview has just taken place with a 'a well-known wall-paper manufacturer,' who, in the course of his remarks, informed the representative of the _Morning Comet_ that black wall-papers were now all the rage. 'You would be surprised,' he said, 'how little these papers really detract from the lightness of a room, the glossiness of their surface compensating almost for the darkness of their shade;' and upon this score there would seem to be no reason why a good pitch paper should not serve as an artistic decorative covering for the walls of a drawing-room or a 'dainty' boudoir.