If we select and take a new house before we attempt our decorations let us instal a caretaker. Ay! even with her grimy self and her still more grimy goods and bronchial family, heavy with the continual colds inseparable from living in empty houses and never anywhere else; and let us see by ocular demonstration that she keeps going the large and splendid fires which should be in all the rooms even before we contemplate how we are going to treat them. For until the house has been exposed to the ordeal by warmth we cannot possibly tell whether we shall have to begin by relaying shrunken floors; putting the ever useful ‘Slater’s Patent’ round every door and window, and whether it were not well to transfer certain doors from left to right or _vice versa_, because of the position of fire and window, which can only be really determined when we see how the fire burns, and from which side comes most of the almost certain draught. Thus too are tested the young and untried chimneys, which, should they smoke, are to be examined by a practical man before anything else can be done. They may smoke through faulty construction. In this case new grates must be had from Haines & Co., 83 Queen Victoria Street, who have a grate that can easily deal with this desperate strait. Or they may require tall chimney-pots, or a mere ‘blower,’ which is best when made of a clear thick sheet of glass. In any case, they must be treated at once. A smoky chimney is death to one’s decorations, spoils one’s temper, and one’s white curtains and new cretonnes, and gives the maids cause for dissatisfaction, the while we take a hatred at once to the house and always remember its unkind reception of us, however well it may behave to us when we find ourselves better acquainted with its little ways. It would not be an auspicious manner of beginning an acquaintance should some would-be friend receive us with sulks and a turned-away countenance, which might be shyness, and is certainly bad mannered: I question much if we should ever reach friendship should our advances be met in a similar way! In such a manner does a smoky chimney make one feel towards the house it is a part of, and once we are received with smoke in our own domain, we can never really forget or forgive a reception we should not have had, had we kept up good fires before we entered into possession thereof. When the house is warmed, we can proceed to deal with each portion thereof as our tastes and our purses permit; but we must never allow anything which really offends our own special taste to remain; neither must we be talked into taking anything we don’t like. If we don’t know our own minds in these days, there are advisers to be had on whom reliance can be placed. But if we have the least idea of what we want, let us get it. It is our own house after all, and it is right it should represent us, and not other folk. At the same time many people who can recognise