In a "Children's House" in the country, at Palidano, built to commemorate the Marchese Carlo Guerrieri Gonzaga, we initiated the study of "artistic" furnishing. It is well known that every little corner of Italy is a storehouse of local art, and there is no province which in bygone times did not contain graceful and convenient objects, due to a combination of practical sense and artistic instinct. Nearly all these treasures are now being dispersed, and the very memory of them is dying out, under the tyranny of the stupid and uniform "hygienic" fashions of our day. It was therefore a delightful undertaking on the part of Maria Maraini to make careful inquiries into the rustic local art of the past, and to give it new life by reproducing, in the furniture of the "Children's Houses," the forms and colors of tables, chairs, sideboards, and pottery, the designs of textiles and the characteristic decorative motives to be met with in old country-houses. This revival of rustic art will bring back into use objects used by the poor in ages less wealthy than ours, and meanwhile may be a revelation in "economy." If, instead of school benches, such simple and graceful objects were manufactured, even this school furniture would show how beauty may be evolved from ugliness by eliminating superfluous material; for beauty is a question, not of material, but of inspiration. Hence we must not look to richness of material, but to refinement of spirit for these practical reforms. If similar studies should be made some day upon the rustic art of all the Italian provinces, each of which has its special artistic traditions, "types of furniture" might arise which would in themselves do much to elevate the taste and refine the habits. They would bring to the enlightenment of the world an "educational mode," because the time-honored artistic feeling of a people with a very ancient civilization would breathe new life into those moderns who seemed to be suffocating under the obsession of physical hygiene, and to be actuated solely by a despairing effort to combat disease.