Some of my most cherished boyhood memories centered about bird's-eye-maple bedroom sets and parlor furniture of heavy black walnut trimmed in a manner which subsequently came to be popular among undertakers for the adornment of the casket when they had orders to spare no expense for a really fashionable or--as the saying went then--a tony funeral. Tony subsequently became nobby and nobby is now swagger, but though the idioms change with the years the meaning remains the same. When the parlor was opened for a formal occasion--it remained closed while the ordinary life of the household went on--its interior gave off a rich deep turpentiny smell like a paint-and-varnish store on a hot day. And the bird's-eye maple, as I recall, had a high slick finish which, however, did not dim the staring, unwinking effect of the round knots which so plentifully dappled its graining. Lying on the bed and contemplating the footboard gave one the feeling that countless eyes were looking at one, which in those days was regarded as highly desirable. I remember all our best people favored bird's-eye maple for the company room. They clung to it, too. East Aurora had a hard struggle before it made any noticeable impress upon the decorative tendencies of West Kentucky, for we were a conservative breed and slow to take up the mission styles featuring armchairs weighing a couple of hundred pounds apiece and art-craft designs in hammered metals and semi-tanned leathers. Moreover, a second-hand shop in our town was not an antique shop; it was what its name implied--a second-hand shop. You didn't go there to buy things you wanted, but to sell things you did not want. So in view of these youthful influences it should be patent to all that, having other things to think of--such, for example, as making a living--I did not realize that in New York at least those wishful of following the modes did not go to a good live shop making a specialty of easy payments when they had a house-furnishing proposition on their hands. That might be all very well for the pedestrian classes and for those living in the remote districts who kept a mail-order catalogue on the center table and wrote on from time to time with the money order enclosed. I soon was made to understand that the really correct thing was first of all to call in a professional decorator, if one could afford it. A professional decorator is a person of either sex who can think up more ways and quicker ways of spending other people's money than the director of a shipping board can. But whether you retained the services of a regular decorator or elected to struggle along on your own, you went for your purchases to specialty shops or to antique shops, or--best of all--to the smart auction shops on or hard by Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue.